BakaTest is a fun little show with a crazy premise that it occasionally falls into the trap of taking seriously. Last episode was a standard beach fanservice episode with no plot to get in the way of our fun, but eventually summer vacation is going to end, the characters are going to go back to school, and the bakas we love will be diluted by tests and shoukanjuus. If we’re lucky we’ll get at least one more episode of summer vacation, though, and that episode will be episode 2 of Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu season 2.
…thirty minutes pass…
You say that as though he had ever stopped.
Huh! I didn’t expect continuity. I expected the punishment to be meted out off-camera between the episodes and never mentioned again. Instead they spent a whole episode on it, which left this episode feeling a light and content-free. I mean, a cross-dressing punishment game for hitting on the other girls at the beach is all well and good, Mutsurini looks great in a yukata, but it should be one component of a beach fanservice episode. It’s not enough to stand as a whole episode on its own. As evidence of this, the first few minutes of this episode were utter filler. Akihisa: “the girls are being nice! it must be a trap.” The girls: *are nice to Akihisa*. Basically they just repeated that over and over until they decided they’d filled enough time and then it was time for – Akihisa “wow the girls keep being nice, I guess it’s not a trap.” The girls: *spring trap*.
They could have at least filled the time with some jokes about traditional summer festival activities. Like, Akihisa goes to scoop a goldfish, only he’s an idiot so he keeps failing, then he finally gets one but he imagines it crying out to him about not wanting to be separated from his friends (just like he does not want to be separated from Minami and Himeji and all his other friends, it is a heartwarming moral!), and so he tries to scoop all the goldfish at once, which of course leads to utter failure. Akihisa’s such an idiot, haha! There, there is a gag for you. Maybe it is not so great, but really anything with even the form of a joke showing up outside the yukata beauty contest (which was, in fairness, pretty good) would have been very welcome. The first season was good, and the first episode of this season was good, so I’m not about to drop the show, but man, this was a bad ep.
suntzuanime 