Friday 7 February 2014

Wake Up, Girls! - Episode 5

The Wake Up Girls have themselves a second song, and now they have themselves a second concert.  There is one slight problem with this however - it takes place on the same day as one of I-1 Club's events in Sendai.

Still, the group's members aren't to be deterred by this, and set about working hard on learning the song, choreography and ensuring that they do the best they can with the opportunity that's been presented to them, while also figuring out ways to bolster their set list and the like.  While all of this goes on, Mayu's past with I-1 Club continues to be the elephant in the room that everybody skirts around; indeed, she even seems reluctant to engage with it herself when she meets a former I-1 Club colleague.


Of course, hard work will only get you so far, and on the day of the concert the Wake Up Girls learn two things - one, that they're still a long, long way from being a polished idol unit; and two, that any thoughts they might have had around giving I-1 Club a proverbial black eye were downright delusion.  When Tange invites them to see I-1 Club in action at their purpose built Sendai theatre, the girls get to see for themselves how wide that gulf really is.

So ends another episode of Wake Up, Girls! that doesn't really do anything wrong, but doesn't do anything particularly notable either.  I still can't remember any of the girls' names apart from Mayu, which says a lot as to how disposable they all are, and Mayu's I-1 Club controversy continues to be danced around more and more clumsily - just like the girls on stage, as it happens.  While it's nice to see an idol unit not becoming instantly successful and proficient with little effort, it feels disjointed to see the group regress from the competent performance in the show's movie outing to the bumbling routines depicted here, and there isn't really enough on show here to lend weight to any broader narrative.  As Twinkle suggested to the girls, perhaps they need to start arguing a bit more?  It might make things a little more interesting...

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