Sometimes you can learn more about a person by their family than anything else.

What They Say:
So exactly what’s going to happen when Hachiman Hikigaya, an isolated high school student with no friends, no interest in making any and a belief that everyone else’s supposedly great high school experiences are either delusions or outright lies, is coerced by a well meaning faculty member into joining the one member “Services Club” run by Yukino Yukinoshita, who’s smart, attractive and generally considers everyone in her school to be her complete inferior?

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a bit of fun with sports in the previous episode that had Yukino getting more involved with both Yui and Hikigaya, the group is starting to come together a bit more and with a little more understanding. But there’s always more and deeper wells to go down in order to understand someone and with Hikigaya we get a good bit of detail from the start, seeing his home life with his sister and how free she is in certain ways. But we also get a brief flashback that shows why he’s had so much trouble fitting in from the get go, though some of it is likely self imposed, because of the accident that laid him up in the hospital for awhile. It’s cliche but there’s truth to it in that when you get that kind of later start, it’s hard to sync up with others unless someone really outgoing and friendly takes you in. And you have to be amenable to it yourself and to try, something that Hikigaya never really seems like he’d be capable of doing.

The first half of the show works some of this fun into things and we see more of how isolationist Hikigaya can be. When the shadow your parent thing comes up for seeing them at the work place, he’s making a big play to shadow his at home father in his report as to why he wants to do it and it’s just a big plea in the end to stay home and do nothing for a day. But while that infuriates his teacher and we see how he’s trying to keep distance, there are those that are trying to draw him out. In a rather innocent way, we see how Yui does her best to ask him for his number so she can keep in touch with him and Yukino gives him back plenty of grief along the way about a variety of things. Yukino continues to be the cold and distant character, which can work for only so long, but she’s so easily dismissive of Hikigaya that you do have to grin about it since he prefers to be dismissed and not thought of.

The show does delve into some storyline material here where the trio is approached to help solve a bit of a mystery involving a few guys in one of the classes where they have to figure out who the bad guy is with what happened. Which is pretty much high school stuff and easily dismissed. The fun part comes in seeing the way that Yukino gets into the situation in her restrained way and starts to investigate the three persons of interest in the class to see who is most likely. The small story here has the advantage of filling us in on a bit more of the colorful personalities in the class, mostly guys but a few of the girls as well, and we get to see it largely through Hikigaya’s dead stare, which is just hilarious to watch as he deadpans his internal dialogue while observing all of them.

In Summary:
As I’ve come to see with this show over the first few episodes, the main story and ideas in each one isn’t what’s drawing me to it. What’s keeping me interested and being rather fascinated at times with it is the way it works Hikigaya to provide a lead character that’s aware of his situation and has some good clarity, in his own mind at least, to put it all together. His distance seems natural after what’s happened to him and the struggles he’s faced, but also just the way that he wants to get through it all and move on with his life. Of course, if he makes the right changes here, his life will likely go better and easier to handle once he gets more of the needed framework for dealing with others. The expansion on his past, his family and seeing him in observation mode of others in this episode is what wins the day as most of the rest just left me feeling somewhat middling at best about it.

Grade: B-

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.