Nichijou - Episode 13

It feels a bit like it's been an eternity, but Nichijou reaches its half-way mark with the closest the series has come to a contiguous plot point yet.

This progression comes courtesy of the Professor and Nano, with the latter still dreaming of having a normal (well, as normal as you can get with this series) school life, even if there seems to be little chance of that between the Professor and the fact that she has a screw in her back,  As the episode goes on, so we see a number of occasions with this duo behaving as per their usual selves (is it me, or is the Professor getting more annoying by the week?) culminating in a stormy night which scares both of them witless, yet in turn also seems to persuade the Professor to let her charge go to school.  Cue a new mine of comedy to be explored for the second half of the series, I would assume.

Away from this particular duo, much of the rest of the episode focuses on Mio and Yuuko - perhaps the best sketch of this instalment involves a clearly ill Yuuko struggling into school just so that she can show her friend some magic tricks, only for everything to go horribly wrong through her haze of illness.  To be honest even this isn't exactly laugh-out loud comedy, but it is at least well timed and presented enough to raise a smile, which is about the best this episode has to offer.

The possibility of moving Nano into a high school setting is perhaps the most promising part of this episode, as the rest of the instalment seems proof positive that the series really needs to do something fresh as it appears to be largely stuck in a rut of predictable and unfunny attempts at humour give or take the odd moment here and there.  I wouldn't go expecting any miracles from the second half of this series, but the change might do it some good at least.