SKET Dance - Episode 6 (Dropped)

Out of sheer pig-headedness I've been determined to stick with SKET Dance to the bitter end - I mean, it's not that bad, right?  So what's the harm?  Well, the damage of too much mediocrity has now been done and I just can't take any more.

After introducing the student council fully last episode before having their vice president barge in on the SKET-dan's proceedings at the tail-end of the episode, we come to the unsurprising hook of this week's instalment - that the student council want to see the club shut down, viewing it as they do as pointless and (perhaps more to the point) a magnet to delinquents like Momoka to hang out at.  Just as the two groups are arguing the toss about this, the SKET-dan receive a request for help.  Their task - to put on a play to entertain a bunch of little kids that have been let down by the drama club who were supposed to be putting on a show for them.

Thus, this assignment soon turns into a contest between the SKET-dan and student council to see who can entertain the children more (what about us? we need entertaining too guys!), with the former group choosing to act out Snow White while the student council ropes the drama club president into helping them with a performance of Peter Pan.  In a fit of pique, it's this same drama club president who smashes up the SKET-dan's props and costumes - an act that the student council entirely disagrees with, leading to them declaring the contest null and void only to find out that the SKET-dan's membership hasn't been put off by this setback at all....

As has been the case pretty much from day one, SKET Dance is utterly safe and, equally, utterly mediocre - it exists in a world where even the bad guys are nice really and at times it's almost sickeningly twee.  I have no bones with shows that try to be light-hearted at all times (I have a Hidamari Sketch character as my avatar for heaven's sake), but if you're going down that route then don't pretend that you can create drama and tension from the scenarios you create because you simply can't.  Even worse is that this episode, like many earlier instalments, was incredibly predictable - we knew instantly that the SKET-dan would win their contest, but more importantly it was also immediately obvious as to how it would pan out, and so it proved.  A lack of drama coupled with a lack of imagination leaves this series as the digital equivalent of yesterday's paper that you'd use to wrap your fish and chips in - it's old news, and what might have briefly entertained you before has become useless for anything but menial tasks.