天下制覇

The punchline that never grows old.

Reminder: Darma in the Bronx is off this week with a goddamned recap special of all things, because there's so much to recap after running the same damn arc twice, once with manic pixie girl, then with suicidal pixie girl, both times the same girl thanks to the power of retcon. Protagonist remains unchanged and largely uninvolved.

Impressions:

There's like three or four episodes worth of premises here. Some kind of trading places between the psychics, Hina joining a hard rock band and traveling the full path from stage shows to megastardom and Behind the Music fall, Nitta being ostracisized for kicking her out… and yet, it kept jumping right from the start of each of those to the end. Not even in the sense of skipping over some big arc offscreen and letting that be a joke. More like everything happened in an afternoon (despite a claim or two to the contrary). And no, that's not the joke either. Instead, let's imagine that half the episode was Hina Mr. Magoo-ing her way through a rock stardom arc, while Nitta engages in more and more elaborate schemes to convince the world that she's still living with him. Neither breaks the bank on creativity, but there's plenty of quick one-off jokes available in both scenariors, and more importantly, compared to this? And then we come to the weird second part of the Glory of Homeless People thing began last week; basically five straight minutes of Hitomi literally screaming "SHE IS SO POOR."

My patience with this show (with both Friday shows) is running pretty thin. Despite a dry one-liner here and there, this continues to meander around, unwilling to commit to any premise that isn't sappy sentimentality, and the last two episodes have all but completely gotten rid of the overpowered psychic girl angle, reducing that to parlor tricks at best, more often just forgetting that it exists at all. Commit to something and run with it. Round out the characters, add a story, ramp up the humor, something. Superficially doing a little bit of everything only gets you white noise.