天下制覇

 

At least they didn’t spell it “lolipop.”

I can’t remember what I said about Imposter Trout last week, but I remember thinking that it needed to open up and be about more than just the unadventurous, shouty two leads. So when I flipped quickly through it and saw almost nothing but them, that killed the last vestiges to look any deeper.

Impressions:

I feel like this episode was taking itself just a biiiit too seriously, or maybe I’m just not intimate enough with the culture of smoking in Japan. Maybe the entire premise is a joke to them, but here in the land of commercials where smoking is regularly compared to cat piss and the sweat off Satan’s tit, and a single whiff of second hand smoke is implied to murder every baby in a mile radius, the idea of militant anti-smoking people forming up mobs to attack smokers or second-hand smoke breaking robots is just a bit mundane. I suspect that the show might have realized this too, as it took practically the entire thing before it got to the magical wall of secondhand smoke, and even that was pretty half-hearted.

Which also doesn’t excuse the always enthralling “character development through flashbacks” routine that Japan is so enamored of. It was ostensibly an episode about… uh… the other guy with brown hair and to a lesser extent, Mr. Moustache, but smoking and getting water dumped on him is about all he actually did. Even in his flashbacks, he was just “learning a valuable lesson” through being yapped at, and for very loose definitions of learning, valuable, and lesson. I don’t even know why it required a flashback for that either. Honestly, I think Japan just uses them out of habit these days.

Next Episode:

WEEDS.