K-ON!! - Episode 15

After a few episodes of summer fun and frolics, it's back to school for the light music club with K-ON!!'s fifteenth episode. Although, perhaps "physical punishment" would be a better description that school, as it appears that one of the first events to befall the entire institution is a school marathon.

That said, calling it a "marathon" is a little over the top considering it's only around a five kilometre road race, but still it isn't something that any of the light music club members are particularly looking forward to. While Mugi tries to prepare for the event with some rather odd cullinary concoctions to improve her stamina, Yui goes a more... well, Yui-esque preparation, largely involving upside-down weather dolls in the hope of bringing rain.


Of course, rain doesn't come or even appear to threaten at any point, and so the so-called marathon begins with most of the light music club taking up a decidedly sluggish pace, bolstered only by Mio's panic at the prospect of coming last and attracting unwanted attention. So it goes that we watch the girls (as well as the likes of Ui and Jun) running their various races, before perhaps the closest K-ON!! has ever come to drama as Yui goes missing before being found again and setting up a comic finish. Well, two comic finishes to be precise.

Perhaps I just wasn't in a K-ON!! frame of mind today, but I have to confess that this episode bored me rather aside from its amusing finishing line shenanigans - Even by this show's standards there really wasn't anything much for us to get our teeth into, and a result any comedy or even a sense of fun was a little lacking. Let's be honest, there isn't much humour to be derived from the whole marathon concept, and although this episode tried its best it just failed to capture my interest at any point. It's a rare misstep for the normally impeccably calculating K-ON!!, but that's really all I can call it on a personal level.