K-ON!! - Episode 18

While the culture festival seems to be a staple part of any school-based anime diet, it is perhaps of more relevance to a show like K-ON!! given the importance of such an event upon the light music club. However, it appears that this time around there's going to be more to worry about than just a music performance...

The reason for this is that the class inhabited by most of the girls has elected to perform a play - Romeo and Juliet to be precise, and guess who has the lead role? Yep, that's right, Mio has been voted to take Romeo's role (cue a so bad it's good Ro-mio joke from Yui) much to her horror, while Ritsu of all people has been voted to take Juliet's part to complete that particular double act.


Needless to say, early rehearsals for these two don't go so well (although Yui's turn as "Tree G" seems to be almost masterful), with Mio proving far too shy to have any kind of stage prescence while Ritsu isn't exactly the most feminine of Juliets. Ritsu in particular refuses to give up however, and eventually it looks as though the pair of them have nailed their roles... until Mio is up in front of the rest of the class, where she crumbles again.

This takes us to a session of "special training", which involves all of the girls (although the focus is of course on Mio) working as waitresses in a rather up-market cafe. It seems that even this isn't enough to turn things around particularly, so will all be well for the actual performance of the play itself? Who knows, we're going to have to tune in next week to find out.

Although the musical side of things has taken a complete back seat this episode (it's barely even referenced), that's never really been a problem for this series and it proves not to be once again. While this instalment overall was great fun to watch, it had a few truly stand-out moments, not least Satoshi's spit-take moment which is possibly the greatest ever to grace an anime, Yui's cheese pen and Mio's attempt to imagine a world (or at least a classroom) where everybody is Ritsu. In short then, there were quite a few laugh out loud moments here, and that's what I cherish most from K-ON!! in an episode that made the best of the personalities of its central characters while still holding more in its proverbial entertainment tank to keep things moving. I genuinely thought that making this series twenty-six episodes long was a really bad idea; looks like I've been proved wrong so far.