天下制覇

I think it's past time to start looking ahead to next season.

Impressions:

Hold on a minute here. Last week, we made a huge deal out of how horrible it was that only one team got to go to nationals instead of two. This week, they begin by showing that there were only nine teams in this stupid tournament to begin with. Not just that, but literally some rando Not-Appearing-In-This-Show team got the first round bye. Not the previous champs. Not the top seed. Apparently the expectation was that if that team won a single game, they would be going to Nationals. And it's a tragedy that only 10% of the teams will go instead of closer to 25%.

Anyway, I'm making so much out of a screenshot of a bracket that was up for about three seconds because the rest of the episode was pretty damn close to the same empty space as last week's. The big difference is that instead of montaging over the entire match, they montage over about one and a half games of it, so we'll be continuing on with the exact same thing next week, and at this point, I wouldn't be shocked if the show just ran out the goddamned clock on the show using this one match. It also doesn't help when it cuts away to their cerebral planning sessions, with strategies like "let's get points to keep the score close" and "you'll block her spikes." Not sarcasm. That's the actual plan put forth that it needed to cut away from the action to explain.

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