I can't tell what kind of story they're trying to tell. It still feels as if it's The Damnation of Haruhi Suzumiya, but this episode was like a non-stop shout-out to Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a detour at the end to The Matrix.

It wasn't very good.

I can't escape the suspicion that there is eventually going to be some sort of huge revelation, a big twist that changes everything. There was a series like that a few years ago (I'm not going to mention the name) which began as a mecha show, the old story about the outsider who gets drafted to be a mecha pilot. And at a certain point it was revealed that it was really a brain-in-a-bottle story; the entire reality shown up to that point was an illusion, and all of them were preserved inside a computer system.

I wonder if this is going to be the same kind of thing.

Here's one way it could play out:

If indeed Yuri has something akin to the same power over reality that Haruhi has, then in response to seeing her siblings get horribly murdered, she's created a place where the people she loves come back when they die. No one there can die permanently, as long as they're part of her adoptive family. For all practical purposes, that's what the SSS is.

Otonashi asked her how she died -- and she didn't tell him. I'm not convinced that she did die.

I don't necessarily think that's how it's going to go, but it's a possibility.

My intuition at this point is that it's about 3:1 that when the revelation does happen, my reaction to it will be, "That's really stupid!" I think that this series is most likely to be a disappointment. But I'll keep watching it, at least another episode.

UPDATE: By the way, I had some really serious suspension-of-disbelief problems with this episode. A handful of high school students were able to create that entire underground complex with just their bare hands? Yeah, right.

UPDATE: Aroduc thinks that the show was supposed to be a joke. I didn't find any of it funny, and even more to the point I didn't feel as if they thought it was, either.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:19 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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