What They Say:
The Presidents cake is missing and the entire student council are her prime suspects. The case is going well until Sugisaki suffers mysterious head trauma.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Student Council’s Discretion Level 2 has certainly had an awkward start. With an episode zero that set up the season by being almost all flashback material and then a first episode that was the epitome of a show about nothing – that only had some amusing bits – the show now has to move forward with something else. And that something else, at its core, is a missing cake. The series is certainly setting itself up for some big and weighty subjects, interpersonal relationships and engaging conflicts, isn’t it?
Things start off pretty quickly here as we learn, post opening credits, that President Sakurano’s cake has been stolen. That puts Ken on the case where he plays detective, questioning her and other others about what happened. Flashbacks ensue as he works down the list a bit and puts things together with his own perspective on things since the “locked room” where the cake was had all of them enter it. The accusations fly easily since the cake is such a hugely important thing to Sakurano. There aren’t a lot of mental gymnastics going on here but it’s cute at times to see Sakurano’s accusations get shot down so easily, and quickly, when those she’s pushing against make it plain how events transpired upon their arriving in the room.
The show even has Ken’s questioning being used against him at one point, turning him into the apparent criminal of the situation. It does get a bit more complicated when the teacher is involved as Magiru is revealed to be somewhat guilty in this as she ate some of it, but not all of it. The show plays with the character dynamics a fair bit as it goes on, even getting Ken to play amnesiac for awhile, which has attempts to fix by reading the manga version of the series in order to remember everything. The show goes with plenty of this kind of back and forth goofiness as it goes along, but the problem continues to be the same. It runs from verbal gag to verbal gag without making these characters any more than just setup and execution bits. With three episodes now, beyond the bit of knowledge we got about Ken in the first, nothing here is really making them interesting in the slightest.
In Summary:
The drama over the cake goes into full gear here, though there is a little bit of a trick to the gag about the whole thing with some food poisoning coming into play. The truth of the matter is a simple one, if awkward when you really get down to how it would work in reality, but the whole gist of it deals with just having the kids play detective, accuser and accused in trying to figure out where the cake went. There are some fun gags at times, especially with Ken reading the manga to regain his memories, but the show in general just continues to feel empty and devoid of anything more than paper thin characters.
Grade: C-
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.
