Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei - Episode 11

Seeing Nozomu without his glasses is a pretty odd experience in itself, but this is exacttly how episode eleven of Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei opens, with our favourite despairing teacher eschewing his glasses (which were supposedly stolen by ghosts) for a pair of contacts.

Of course, this won't do at all, so the class chips in to buy him a new pair... Except Kafuka decides to buy Nozomu a pair of tinted glasses for some reason. If that wasn't funny enough by itself (and to be honest, seeing Nozomu wearing tinted glasses got a bit laugh out of me on its own), these glasses also lets him see the world through... well, tinted glasses. Thus, the prejudices come thick and fast. A visit to the shop where these glasses were procured brings forth numerous pairs of glasses with different tints, and even tinted headphones. Just make sure you don't look in the mirror whilst wearing a pair of these glasses, it isn't pretty...


The second segment of the episode is a rather odd little story of Rin buying up properties adjoining her house just so that she can go and eat ramen without leaving her own home. As you do. With that gone (for now at least), we enter the ever-increasing number of scenarios where people look to be deliberately provocative (or "trolling", if you want to switch the whole thing into online terminology). From politicans who fall into stupid traps set for them through to game developers who "mistakenly" leave in a bug that removes the pixellation (you know what kind of games we're talking about here, don't be coy), the usual surfeit of examples get covered before Chiri gets involved and everything becomes a bit surreal.

Aside from a few odd moments (and a great bit of product placement for the iPhone), this wasn't the funniest of episodes, with the first "tinted glasses" segment also easily proving to be the funniest while the rest of this instalment fell a little flat. You can't win them all though...