SKET Dance - Episode 2

After serving up perhaps the spring season's most mediocre opening episode thus far, SKET Dancewas in dire need of improvement after setting its scene and moving into its second episode, something it does via two stories rolled into a single instalment.

The first half of this episode introduces us to a wannabe samurai with an irritatingly semi-olde world way of speaking who comes to see the SKET-dan for help - in short, since changing his position in the kendo club's fighting order he's gone from an undefeated head of the team to a poor excuse for a kendo club member who can't buy a victory.  What's the cause of his malaise?  Cue some quick-fire, gag-heavy attempted fixes before the final solution to his problem presents itself - the wonders of strong mint sweets.

The second half of episode two sees the SKET-dan tasked with looking after a monkey by one of the students, and conversely put in charge of disposing of a "bomb" created by their advisor and school chemistry teacher.  Needless to say these two requests merge together with dangerous and comedy-driven consequences which themselves align with the irritation of another of the school's teachers with the club; a chain of events that may has well have been written up on screen in massive letters, so obvious was the path this chunk of the episode was all set to take.

Compared to that hugely lacklustre first instalment, this week's SKET Dance is a big, big improvement.  Admittedly, this isn't enough to make it a great episode or even anything close to that, but it did have a few decent jokes and made me laugh a handful of times, while its over-the-top energy and pace managed to carry it through to some extent even when it wasn't proving to be quite so successful.  SKET Dance's biggest problem still seems to be the fact that the way it goes about its business is hugely unoriginal and equally entirely predictable, but at least this instalment has proved that there is some life to the series even if its heavily reliant on any given episode being given some good episodic meat on its proverbial plate to work with.