Poolside. Beachside. Must be time for swimsuits. I suspect the girls, however, will simply look cute.

What They Say:
Episode 5: “We Spent a Night Together”

While Tamako and her friends prepare for the big swimming field trip at school, Mochizo decides to tell Tamako how he feels about her. Dera, ever the gentleman, decides to lend a helping hand, only to encounter a protective Midori intent on keeping Tamako safe.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
It’s summer, so it must be time for the girls to go to the pool. Tamako, Midori and Kanna prepare to head off. As Tamako spots Mochizo across the street, she invites him along, though Midori reminds her that they’ll be in their swim suits (well … duh), so the invitation is swiftly revoked. They meet up with Shiori and head off to the pool to practice, since both Tamako and Kanna apparently cannot swim. They are practicing since there will soon be a school trip to the beach which will involve a swimming test. Hilarious antics ensue, I guess.

We then have a dull interlude focusing on Mochizo and his hopeless one-sided crush on Tamako. He speaks aloud his daydreams, only to have Dera show up (and re-enact them). Oddly, his intervention is slightly welcome here, as otherwise this was getting boring. I’d rather be slightly annoyed than completely bored. Dera offers his help to Mochizo, for whatever that’s worth. We next see the young ladies in their summer uniforms, I guess, which look vaguely like pink nurses’ uniforms. So, it’s off to the beach trip for school.

Once at the beach, Mochizo vainly tries to express his feelings for Tamako, but a new wrinkle enters with Midori intervening to prevent Tamako from receiving any word from Mochizo. We get an odd situation where a boring “boy wants to confess crush to girl” episode becomes an even more boring “boy tries to confess to oblivious girl but is blocked by other girl who might have a crush on same girl” episode. I know situations like this have their appeal to their fans, but frankly, I wonder why two fairly shallow and under-developed characters (Mochizo and Midori) would expend so much time and effort on a one-dimensional approximation of a character (Tamako). If these were interesting characters involved, this rather tired situation would at least be interesting because of the persons involved. Since all of these characters lack any serious depth or complexity, it’s not really that fascinating.

The biggest problem for me with this show is that it has failed to make the title character at all interesting. It is the side characters, Anko and Shiori, for example, who are much more intriguing to watch, since we have seen parts of their past and actions that provide a certain sense of who and what they are. Tamako, the title character, in contrast is about as generically cute and genki (I would like to use an English term, but words fail here to a certain extent unless I want to be mean and say “happy, energetic, and vapid”) as possible, but lacking any and all other substance. Her friend Midori is similarly a cipher to a great extent (Kanna is better defined, but only in a two-dimensional way as the quirky and weird off-kilter friend). Mochizo is just a mopey childhood friend who lacks the guts to confess to his shallow and ditzy object of love.

Thus, it’s not necessarily the retread plots and recycled situations that are starting to turn me off this show. It is the utter inability of the writing at this point (at least a third of the way in if this is a single cour) to make me care at all whether Tamako finds true happiness or gets run over by a streetcar.

In Summary:
We have a beach and pool episode, but one that is light on the fanservice (this isn’t really that kind of show). We have a romantic plot and perhaps a romantic triangle that is about as thrilling to view as washing the dishes when you’re tired after a long day of work. The cliched situation is not, itself, the main problem this show has in retaining my attention. The real heart of my dissatisfaction comes from the lack of characters about whom I really have any strong feelings about, whether positive or negative. That lack of care and concern is serious, since if I don’t care about the characters, then why should I care about what they do?

Grade: C+

Streamed by: The Anime Network

Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard