SKET Dance - Episode 4

Continuing down its episodic path, SKET Dance's fourth episode again finds itself split into two discrete story lines for our delectation.

The first of these two plots concerns a girl named Roman Saotome, a lover of old shoujo manga who seems the world through screen-toned spectacles, living out her life as though everything before her is out of some romance manga.  This is the case when she has what seems like a fateful meeting with a kind, good-looking stranger, and thus Roman heads off to the SKET-dan to ask for their help in tracking him down.  Of course, it turns out that this stranger is closer to home than we might have otherwise assumed, in an episode that makes more of its fourth-wall breaking comments than anything else.

After that actually half-decent slice of fun, the second half of this episode suddenly seems all the more terrible, with a poorly hashed-out story of a missing prize-winning lollipop wrapper that involves the girl's softball team captain, a ridiculous excuse for hunting for the wrapper in question (albeit deliberately so) and the delinquent who was responsible for the whole "paint throwing" thing in the show's opening episode.

If this instalment of SKET Dance does one thing, it's demonstrating just how hit and miss this series is looking likely to be.  Okay, so the first half of this episode wasn't the most memorable thing you're likely to see, but its self-referential jibes were occasionally amusing and the stupid twist in the tale at the end worked okay, only to be completely cast aside without any kind of proper ending to the story, such is this show's disposable nature.  The second half however... well, it was terrible.  Utterly, abjectly awful.  Sure, some of its awful nature was deliberate, but the whole thing was clumsy, predictable, unfunny and just plain stupid - and feel free to put that quote on the Blu-Ray release, Tatsunoko.