White Album - Episode 3

While I've seen White Album's opening couple of episodes getting a bit of a rough time elsewhere, I've actually rather enjoyed it so far - Sure, it's no True Tears, and it perhaps suffers on account of its origins a little, but overall it's proved to be watchable.

With that in mind, episode three of the series is really more of the same. As promised, Rina gives Touya a call, but rather surprisingly this phone call ends with her offering a job on her management team as a helper. Before he knows it, Rina's current manager has been sacked and he gets the gig, a job that it soon appears is just a ruse to allow Touya and Yuki spend more time together.


Said ruse doesn't last very long however, as after a single day Touya is fired, leaving him jobless and behind on his rent, while a planned date with Yuki gets cancelled when her work gets in the way. That's all without Haruka turning up at all hours and acting as oddly as ever, and a tuition job allocated to Touya with someone who asks him to go away when he arrives for their first tuition session.

There were so many seemingly small and disjointed things packed into this particular episode that its difficult to really get a grip on what White Album is going to be all about by way of a contiguous story line. Obviously the relationship between Yuki and Touya is out there at the front, but this feels so fragile a lot of the time I'm not sure how long that will be the case, particularly given my hunch that there's more to Rina that simple benevolence towards Yuki in getting Touya a job. Still, all these questions floating around in my head (coupled with those ever interesting little textual insights into Touya's thought processes) means that at least this third episode managed to keep things interesting enough to engage my brain... The very brain that almost melted when Rina did her cute little wave in the doorway nearly midway through the episode - Girls that can pull off looks like that on the onen hand while slapping people and throwing tantrums on the other (be it acting or otherwise) are always irresistably dangerous.