Wherein #3 gets to play house.
What They Say:
There’s an outbreak of some serious bugs in cyberspace, sending the Hackadolls into a tizzy. Their hands, feet, and entire bodies are damaged until they lose something very important. Meanwhile, they receive their summoning call. The comparatively sane #3 heads out to advance the client…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Hackadoll continues to charm me far more than I had expected, though it lost a little bit of its love the last time around with the introduction of #4. The show just didn’t feel like it needed another character at this point and had plenty of material to work with using the cast at hand. The original three naturally aren’t explored in depth because the show is about the humor and wacky situations and we haven’t really done too much with them yet all things considered – even as fun as it has been. So it’s nice to see it just sticking to some of them this time around, notably with #3 taking the lead.
With this episode, the cyberspace side is filled with bugs and it’s making for hilarious reactions from the girls that provide nods to all sorts of older shows. This is because #3 has lost her “thing” and is therefore immune, so she gets sent to Earth to deal with a client, a wealthy and spoiled kid. Amusingly, the kid just wants someone to play with in that kind of dictatorial way and she finds herself having to be a girl for awhile. It’s not her thing in general, but we get the nice montage showing her having fun and it’s utterly charming in that simple way while played against the other girls dealing with the bugs back home in their comical forms. Just watching #3 playing house with the kid is hilarious since she’s such a sloth herself, which goes against “tradition” to be sure.
In Summary:
The actual story for #3 here is one that isn’t a surprise with what it does in having her taking on a job in keeping a young boy happy by playing with him. The sheltered life of a child of wealth with absentee parents is a cornerstone of far too many anime stories. It plays nicely here because you know what it wants to do and is going to do through the way #3 is just a lot of fun to watch in this role. It has some surprisingly sweet moments along the way, which isn’t always easy to achieve with a short-form show, and while the kid doesn’t exactly redeem himself in a way, the focus on #3 is nicely done. You get a better feeling for her personality here than in the prior episodes and that comes across in a very good way.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
