Nichijou - Episode 23

It's hard to believe that we're drawing close to the end of Nichijou - it is telling, however, that I'm actually looking forward to see the back of the series at this point in time.

In fact, by this juncture you almost get the feeling that the series itself is simply going through the motions without any particular recourse towards humour - the episode's main segments take in Mio tasting the most revolting jam in human history (complete with plenty of massive over-reactions, who'd have thought?), Sakurai catching Mako with an "unhealthy" magazine in his room, Mako trying to persuade Takasaki to become the advisor to the Igo Soccer club, Nakanojo missing out on a confession from Weboshi on account of his enforced hairstyle change from the last episode, and to keep with that streak of continuity running through this week's instalment Mai pays a visit to the Professor post-dog incident whilst managing to befriend her by drawing sharks.

Really, it's all I can do to just reel off what happened in this week's episode because the entire thing was incredibly dull to the point where it raised nary a smile from me, let alone any full-blown laughs - I'd be tempted to go as far as to say that this is the worst episode of Nichijou yet from that perspective, to the point where I couldn't even find an interesting screen grab for this post.  Given the hit-and-miss nature of the series I wouldn't want to go as far as to say it's entirely run out of steam already, but it certainly feels like a comedy show that deserves to be put out of its misery right now.  Still, at least Yui Horie did the next episode preview this week, which was nice...