With Hachiken in the hospital, the equestrian club needs to pull off the festival without him.
What They Say
“Mikage Gives it Her All”
Content: (please note that the content portion of a review may contain spoilers)
After his collapse at the end of last episode, Hachiken’s friends sit fretting in the equestrian club room. Worried about their friend, they also know that they have to continue with the festival events. Lucky for them, Ayame (Aki’s middle school “rival”) shows up and agrees to help out, albeit in her over-the-top conceited way, and Aki finds Hachiken’s notes for the day, allowing them to pull off the jumps and the Ban’ei race as best as they can. These scenes are where much of the episode’s humor lies, mainly with Ayame showing off and then being forced to be part of the human Ban’ei race against Aki. But there are meaningful moments as well, like when Aki explains what’s happening in the jumping competition to a small girl. After the one of the horses refuses twice and gets disqualified, the rider still tries one more time and makes a jump. It’s because, Aki explains, they don’t want the horse to lose confidence in what he’s doing. “That tells the horse that he can still jump after failing.” A rather pertinent comment, considering the issues Hachiken is having.
After being told he can’t leave the hospital for a day or two, Hachiken falls into a bit of depression when he realizes that none of his friends came to visit. Then, a surprise visitor does show up — the overbearing father he went to Ezonoo to escape. We see first hand how intense of a man Hachiken had to grow up with, and some revelations are made about his middle school life. His father sent him to an intense prep school because Hachiken “liked studying books”, so he sent him to a school where he could do what he liked, which shows some gross misunderstanding of a child, or at least projection of what he thought his kid should be like. Hachiken reveals that he never had friends at that school, because he was always competing with them, while he can relax with the people he met at Ezonoo. But, intense Dad shoots that down by pushing Hachiken towards the thought that he only relaxes because he knows he’s better than them. After belittling Hachiken’s homeroom teacher, he goes to cut out early (working is more important than a fainting son) but Hachiken tries to make one last point, that his Dad enjoyed the bacon he sent — until his Dad rips that away, too, by revealing that his mother lied, and he never made a comment about it.
Hachiken ends up despondent and grumpy, believing that no one likes him because he looks down on them, like his dad said, and also simply feeling useless and misunderstood. He runs into Aki after coming back, and what follows is an adorable scene where Aki’s too flustered to look at him. Though Hachiken thinks this is because she’s disappointed in him, viewers can probably take this as a sign of how much she cares. Then, she cheers him up: first, she points out that no one went to the hospital because when it was open during the day, they had to keep the festival going, which is what they figured he would want; she points out that without his detailed notes, they wouldn’t have known what to do; and she shows him the guest log. Some while some people criticized their show, others loved it, and one stranger admitted to being depressed, but the horses made him happy — the exact feeling Hachiken hoped to achieve.
In Summary
This was another heavy episode for Hachiken as he deals with a lot of problems past and present. From the first episode of the season he’d gained confidence that his father, proven here to be just as scary and unyielding as Hachiken and his brother have made him out to be, was beginning to accept Hachiken’s choices, even if he didn’t understand them. When that turns out to be based on a lie he loses what little faith he has in his family, though his father’s negative influence still seem perfectly capable of influencing his feelings of self worth. But the story’s still uplifting in the end, as the people he’s met at school, who care about him and push him to grow in different ways, disprove his father’s idea that he does not belong with them. Far from resolved, Hachiken’s problems with his parents will likely crop up again, but hopefully when that occurs he’ll remember the good moments in this episode that dispelled bad feelings his family conjures up.
Grade: A-
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: 13″ Apple Macbook set to 720p
