天下制覇

Since when did Yamada become a reliable source of information about anything?

Impressions:

Not a bad way to end it, or at least one of the stronger episodes of the season. Like last season, Matsumoto also got to finally advance from background character and complain/angst about her normalness too. Beats Yet More Yachiyo^tm. The ending-melodrama-du-jour was Yamada thinking Poplar was going to quit and for some inexplicable reason, everybody believed her. The only reason Yamada would even say the sky was blue is if aliens had invaded and injected a pink dye into it.

But leaving that plot hole aside, at least they spent most of it trying to be funny and only a couple minutes moping around. Even Matsumoto was more amusing than I remember from her few lines at the end of last season. Also, Satou tried to tie a cucumber into her hair twirly as a kind of tobacco patch for not being able to screw with Poplar anymore. Yamada♂ even briefly popped up to take a few last minute shots at Poplar’s tinyness too. And yet… still no claw. Writing him out of the show was the worst mistake A-1 ever made. Well, besides that whole Anime no Chikara thing.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final thoughts:

I guess in the end, my opinion really hasn’t changed much so this will probably be short. It certainly started quite a bit stronger than the first season did and they thankfully toned Inami down a lot, but at the same time, they added a whole lot of Yachiyo and Satou that was a bunch of faffing about without ever going anywhere punctuated by long… long……… long……………………… bouts of complete silence. While not making me want to strangle a puppy like Inami did, it was also a hell of a lot harder to enjoy those sequences in any matter at all. If they had added the claw’s cousin or something…

Otherwise, about the same as last season. It had its moments every now and then, almost all of them centered around Yamada and Poplar, and the new characters it added were at least better than the existing cast, but they were also rather underused, especially given how many times they leaned on Yachiyo. I’m sticking with the same opinion as before. It’s an okay comedy, but not much more than that. It needs to excise all the terrible melodrama and characters with less energy than wallpaper paste for it to be anything more than an inconsistent averagish.