Tsuritama - Episode 7

After a summer of hard work, Yuki finally has the money he needs to buy his own fishing gear.  It's a daunting task... but more importantly, why is Haru suddenly not even vaguely interested in fishing?

While their "Bermuda Triangle" incident seems to have been enough to put Haru off the hobby for life, Yuki, Natsuki and Akira carry on fishing whenever an opportunity arises - indeed, we've now reached a point where Natsuki is leaving Yuki to make his own decisions and decide upon his own strategies rather than teaching him how to go about catching fish.

More importantly than such things however, news reaches us via his sister that Natsuki's birthday is coming up, with his family planning to celebrate the big day by - you guessed it - going fishing.  With his friends also brought along for the ride, it looks all set to be a great day, but that would of course be reckoning without the fractious relationship between Natsuki and his father.  As this comes to a head, and another strange incident at sea threatening those upon the captain's boat, a number of relationships are thrown into turmoil as the strange behaviour starting to manifest itself around Enoshima becomes an ever-greater problem.

As I've mentioned over previous weeks, my main issue with Tsuritama continues to be its reliance on fishing as the central arbiter of everything it does - every piece of drama, every argument and each moment of plot progression is carried out with a fishing rod in close proximity, and it does nothing but suffocate the otherwise well-played family drama exhibited by this episode to the point where it significantly weakens its impact.  Alongside this, the presence of Haru and the whole "alien thing" has also done little to move on the other elements of the show up to this point, although it seems as if these oddities are finally going to come to the fore over the next week or two.  I'm still trying my best to like Tsuritama, but at this point it seems like it's something of a lost cause for me.