Sunday 5 December 2010

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru - Episode 9

From being relegated to some pretty brief appearances in this series thus far, antique shop owner Shizuka Kameidou gets to enjoy a fair amount of the spotlight in this ninth episode of Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, starting with a rather profitable little tale before the opening credits of a woman desperate to sell a vase, and her husband who is desperate to keep it.

From there, we move away from Shizuka's world for a while to instead enjoy a P.E. session with Hotori, Tatsuno et al; a lesson which reminds us that yes, Arashiyama is useless at basically everything, whether it's gymnastics (via a simple but effective little gag) or table tennis.  The same can't be said of Tatsuno however, whose brief demonstration of table tennis skills after toying with Hotori for a while leads to an intense showdown with Harue - a truly breath-taking contest for all of those watching, including Sanada and other boys who were previously playing basketball.  Not that Sanada was marvelling at Tatsuno's pin-pong proficiency, as his eyes were drawn to other things...


Next up we return our attentions to Shizuka, as she turns detective on the surprisingly obsessive trail of a delicious multi-coloured snack that doesn't seem to exist.  As the snack was simply handed out to her grandfather by some random passer-by, and with no information on the product online, she has little to work with as her hunt takes her travelling in vain to the supposed location of the store that sells them.  While we know that the store is now closed, Shizuka's abortive attempt to find them prompts a logical response from Hotori - these must be snacks from the future!

Entertaining though this episode was in its own way, it does prove one thing about this series - it starts to flag when it doesn't have Arashiyama's dumb observations and behaviour powering it along.  Practically all of the best moments this week involved her as per usual, and while giving Shizuka's character more of a platform is no bad thing it just didn't really have the same life to itas we've come to expect from this show.  Hotori playing table tennis or doing gymanstics on the other hand... you could probably make an entire series of that and never run out of material.

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