Festivals offer up many opportunities for surprising things to happen.
What They Say:
It’s the Kaimei School Festival, and Bossun’s class is doing a maid cafe. Everybody’s parents show up, and Bossun is approached by a man who claims to be the doctor who delivered him. He has finally decided to tell Bossun the truth of what happened that day, which he has kept secret for 17 years…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the couple of episodes dealing with Bossun’s past dealt with, the show is moving back towards the full cast material and doing the light and fluffy fun. When it does the serious stuff, it generally does it well, not exceptional, but well enough that it makes it interesting to watch and not out of place when you get down to it. When it does the basic character fun like it does here, working the ever growing supporting cast a bit more, it generally works better because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, especially with the double stories per episode method it often employs. For this episode, we’re back in the present and showcasing the school as it works through its latest festival which has maid cafe’s galore, something that Bossun certainly takes advantage of that Himeko hates.
While the festival has a lot of stuff that the kids do and are active about, it also opens up potential for other things as well. And that comes in the fact that the school is a bit more open since parents and other adults can come and visit to see what the students have done. For Bossun, it’s a new phase from his past that makes more sense now as there’s a man that has come to see him to tell him about a terrible secret from his past. Considering what we just saw with the first flashback to when Bossun discovered the truth about his parents, you have to really have a difficult time with the mother that raised him after all this time for not being more truthful from that time. She had hid things naturally from him until the right time, but it was also the right time to really go all out and reveal everything, since you have to assume at the least that she knew something about it.
But that’s dealt with here as Bossun discovers he has a twin brother and that it’s someone he knows, which his deductive abilities makes him realize it’s Tsubaki in a split second. It’s a difficult epilogue section when you get down to it as it deals with what his mother went through and how she did what she could to make sure that Akane’s life wasn’t ruined because of the accident, knowing her friend so well. It’s not hard to believe that she would do this, but it’s harder to believe that others would go along with it and that it’d take so long before the doctor’s guilt became too much to bear. There’s some rather good follow up to it all though when you get to put Bossun and Tsubaki together, making it so that you can see that their relationship won’t really change, at least during their school lives, but that there’s a bit more understanding between the two now.
In Summary:
Sket Dance seemed like it was going to be done with Bossun’s past but it slips in a rather fun and amusing story overall about more of the fallout from his real parents past. It’s kind of drawn out in some ways but it hits the right emotional notes and deals with the way that both Bossun and Tsubaki handles it quite well. Considering the ages of these young men and their own experiences and what they’ve learned before, they’re certainly more than capable of dealing with it properly, though there are some cute moments in the epilogue that really leaves you laughing when they come across each other in the hall. While some parts of this overall back story for Bossun dragged on a bit or didn’t feel like it was structured too well, they’ve done some good things to advance the show and the characters here and it does make me curious as to whether it will really make any impact as the show goes on.
Grade: B+
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
