Thursday 27 February 2014

Silver Spoon Season 2 - Episode 7

Hachiken hasn't quite recovered from either his exhaustion or the frustration of missing out on the school festival, but there's little time to dwell on such things as normal school life returns with a vengeance.

There is, however, one other thing that Hachiken has to worry about - whether his "date" with Mikage is off the cards after his school festival collapse.  Luckily for him the answer is no, it very much isn't, and when a free afternoon off normal equestrian club duties rears its head it seems like the perfect opportunity to make the most of this rare event and pounce on this chance for the two of them to spend some time alone together.  The trouble is, Hachiken's choice of venue and timing happens to coincide with the rest of the equestrian club, making the whole thing decidedly un-date-like despite the best efforts of others.


While all of this is going on, a significant distraction to normal studies is taking place, as the school's baseball team - with Komaba as star pitches tasked with closing out games - fight for a place at the Nationals.  As the team progresses through the tournament in impressive fashion, so confidence amongst those playing and simply watching on the sidelines increase... but perhaps that confidence can too easily turn to over-confidence, as the semi-finals see their dream shattered at the last.  Perhaps now we can start to learn what secret is binding Mikage and Komaba...

Perhaps one of the great joys of this second season of Silver Spoon is how varied its story-telling has managed to be - as well as mining typical fare like school festivals with aplomb, this week saw the series practically turn into a baseball anime for a big chunk of the episode, which it did to great effect.  Alongside this, I'm really enjoying the rapport between Hachiken and Mikage, which feels utterly natural at this point, and with the promise of delving deeper into what's going on in the latter's head soon there could be some more top-notch material still to come by the look of things.

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