White Album 2 - Episode 13 (Completed)

Last week's episode of White Album 2 turned Hazuki and Kazusa's relationship on its head, and as the series finale begins we find the pair desperately trying to escape from black bars that are attacking them.  No matter how much they writhe around trying to escape, even shedding their clothes won't allow them to avoid the grasp of this darkness...

Wait, that is what's happening, right?  Anyhow, come the next morning, the black bars are nowhere to be seen, allowing Kazusa to stagger off to catch her flight while Hazuki is left sulking in his room.  Having ignored Setsuna's phone calls the previous night he seems equally set to shun her ringing his doorbell, but in her typical style Ogiso is having none of it, barging into his room but refusing to talk to him unless he agrees to join her in seeing Touma off at the airport.

This leads to the rather awkward fact that Hazuki now has to reveal his infidelity on the train - not that Setsuna is surprised in the slightest given what she already knew; indeed, she all but insists that she didn't particularly want Hazuki to be her boyfriend but saw it as the only way to keep the three of them together.  As lies go it's a pretty half-baked one, and it quickly falls apart when Hazuki's first response upon seeing Kazusa at the airport is to leap at her tearfully.  Of course, this won't stop Touma leaving for Vienna, but where does that leave Hazuki and Setsuna?  Well, you'll have to decide that for yourself...

Having at least kind of liked, if not exactly warmed to, White Album 2's characters initially, by the end of this final episode I instead ending up rather disliking them all as they all worked towards their own selfish ends with no real attempts to reconcile anything between the trio beyond mere lip service - a chain of events that at least let me feeling like they all got what they deserved, that being effectively nothing.  All of this did at least make for some reasonably dramatic final episodes, which probably could have been fleshed out better rather than spending so much time on the build-up to the school festival that told us little that we didn't already know.  With important parts of the two girl's back stories either left unexplained until late on or not tackled at all, I never really got a grasp on why we should be interested in these characters, which is pretty disappointing for a show with only two love interests for the male lead in the first place.  In a harem series the lack of depth might have been forgivable, but in this instance it felt like... well, a white album, with lots of unused space that resulting in an fulfilling, forgettable romantic drama.