When Medaka is turned into a normal girl, everyone else must step up.
What They Say:
Things aren’t looking well for Student Council, the members are hurt and Medaka is incapacitated. To make matters worse, a new group of 13 students have offered their help to Supervisor Naze.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the introduction of Naze as Medaka’s younger sister, we had a pretty decent episode that filled in some of the blanks that weren’t exactly crying out to be filled in. The back story for Medaka’s home life is something that hasn’t been touch upon too much beyond the addition of her brother this season and a few nods towards when Zenkichi was younger and knew her. With both of them now being introduced and fleshed out a bit, it certainly makes you take in Medaka in a slightly different light but not so much that you really change your opinion of her. For her part, Naze didn’t come off too badly in comparison, but she’s certainly got her issues which have controlled her life.
Because of the situation they’ve ended up in after the previous episode, the antidote is being tossed around and there’s some decent emotion there as Medaka takes one for the team when it comes to dealing with her sister and helping everyone else. The result gives us a Medaka that’s pretty much a non-entity at this point, a young woman with no memories, no abilities and no abnormal aspect to her. Which makes it easy for Naze and Koga to abscond with her to a deeper basement level for their bigger plans, but also to help prepare her for the whole wedding thing that Myanokojou has wanted to do since he first met Medaka and made it his goal to have her for his very own.
This brings in a whole bunch of the 13th Party members that we’ve seen before down there that are itching for a new fight with the student council, especially those that lost. Some, on the other hand, are ready to throw in with the student council and work with them to get Medaka back, though it may be for their own goals. There’s a lot of the usual banter that comes up from a situation like this since we now have the two sides fleshed out even more with a good variety of characters on each, though we know less about the new 13th Party members. With Medaka taken out of the picture for a little bit, it’ll let others take the main focus and we get to see the start of a pretty decent if talkative action sequence towards the end.
In Summary:
Medaka Box Abnormal isn’t abnormal anymore now that she’s been cleansed in a few different ways. There’s some potential for fun there but the removal of Medaka for an episode or two at this stage of the series is a little awkward since she is the one we’re generally here for. That said, having a variety of other characters that have surfaced over the shows run show up now to support the remaining members of the student council is fun and they’re given a decent array of archetypes to deal with that will be holding them off while Naze does her thing. The show doesn’t have a lot of action here but there are some fun scenes that are decently animated, but it continues to lack any real resonance. The show still feels like it’s doing things for the sake of doing them without any real engaging plot to connect it all together.
Grade: B-
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.
