Minami-ke Tadaima - Episode 12

It's the New Year in this penultimate installment of Minami-ke Tadaima, meaning that it's time for the Minami sisters to get dressed up in their finest long-sleeved kimonos... a situation which doesn't last all that long when there are more fun things to be done with them.

From here, the episode meanders here and there, pondering where some of Kana's friends have been over the New Year break, although it seems like half of them can't even remember despite picking up either the dialect or units of measurement of their host locations, and a visit to the indoor swimming pool with the sole purpose on berating how her recently laziness has turned her summer washboard stomach into something, well, decidedly less so.

It's off out into the snow at this point, as Kana and Chiaki both find themselves dragged out from under the kotetsu to make full use of the snow, although it seems that this mostly means just ganging up on Kana in a snowball fight.  Speaking of which, don't mess with Haruka when it comes to snowballs...

In terms of purely providing comedy, this was perhaps the weakest episode of Tadaima thus far - a lot of its setups felt like they were stretching things a little too thin, and there was a real struggle to derive any particularly original comedy from any of the scenarios on show.  Still, even at such weak points there's a certain amount of gentle fun to be had from Minami-ke, so it isn't a complete disaster but rather a distinctly non-memorable episode from a series that can do much better.