Carole & Tuesday – 10 – Out of Whack

It’s the semifinals, which means bringing in a new guest judge to replace the AI dog, and it’s none other than DJ Ertegun, whose troubled history with Carole & Tuesday should have precluded him from judging at all, but I guess Mars Brightest doesn’t do much research!

One thing’s for certain: in a a tough competition where personalities can clash and tempers can flare, MB has appallingly bad security. Consider Cybelle, a stalker Tuesday never should have had to interact with again after she lost in the quarterfinals.

And yet here she is, in the green room, getting in Tues’ face and intimidating her with her unpredictable, capable-of-anything, nothing-to-lose vibe. Then Tuesday simply runs after Cybelle…and Carole lets her! So I ask: where the fuck is security???

When GGK dishes out more cosmic prattle and then performs a competently-produced song with like seven words in the repetitive lyrics, Tao finally pays Angela a visit to tell her they’re changing her song at the last minute.

GGK impresses the judges—who it should be said are easily impressed—and Gus and Dahlia continue their juvenile little competition with poor Roddy in the middle acting as a conduit for their barbs. I’m just not getting much out of the friction between these two.

Once again, Angela delivers the best song of the episode, though that’s not a high bar to clear, with a genuinely catchy pop number that honestly wouldn’t be out of place on a Top 40 radio station. The only strange thing is how it ends: the vocals and music just…stop. On a dime. Seems more like an AI production bug than a feature.

Meanwhile, instead of preparing for her performance with Carole, Tuesday has her priorities all out of order, running around the studio like a headless chicken looking for a Cybelle who is clearly not there anymore and furthermore, doesn’t want to be found. Carole wants to give Tuesday a present, but every time one of them shows up in one spot, the other has just left.

Angela ends up beating GGK, and heads to the showers afterwards, leading to a very suspicious scene of Katie Kimura dropping her smile and staring at the phone Angela left on a table. Is there more to Katie than hyper syncophant? God I hope so, because Angela’s path to becoming a pop star has seemed way too easy so far.

As Pyotr performs another mostly meh pop performance, Tuesday returns to the green room to find a present on the table…but not Carole’s present. The chaotic scrawl wishing her a Happy Birthday suggests it’s from Cybele, who must have doubled back after Tues followed her.

As for the contents of that present? My guess is dry ice, judging from the white smoke cloud that surrounds Tuesday as she clutches her hand in pain when Carole enters. Since Tuesday needs that hand to play guitar, a dry ice burn is going to be a big problem.

But all this could have been avoided with some, any backstage security procedures. Cybelle’s revenge, if that’s what this is, only happened because the show decided that Mars Brightest is not a professional company of long standing capable of protecting one of the four contestants who were whittled down from a quarter of a million. That seems awfully implausible, but here we are. Better break out the aloe!

Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun – 01

Mizutani “Dry Ice” Shizuku eschews friends for grades. When she is asked to deliver printouts for the delinquent Yoshida Haru, her high school life is set on a totally different course. He insists they’re friends, and has an innocent personality but is quick to violence and treats everyone roughly, including her. When he finds out his friends are just using him like she said, she tells them off and provides a shoulder to cry on. He agrees to come back to school, and confesses his love for her.

He follows her around, and she finds out he was the only one with higher grades than she, pissing her off since he doesn’t study. Upperclassmen take her hostage as revenge, but when he arrives to rescue her and she tries to calm him down, he punches her, and she’s through with him. Midterms come, and she comes out ranking first, but isn’t happy. She goes to his house (an arcade) to tell him she doesn’t hate him, and they start hanging out again. Breaking from studying to get monja, he steals a kiss, reiterating his love.

This series doesn’t waste a lick of time, spanning days, weeks, even months, and creating an entire arc of the cold-hearted Shizuku and the wild, naive Haru, who go from complete strangers to pseudo-friends to rivals to enemies to the makings of a couple. Shizuku gets pinned, accosted, threatened with rape, has orange soda thrown on her head, gets kidnapped, and gets slugged really hard in the face. And yet despite all this, she falls for Haru. Indications are he’s her first friend and she’s his, and all of a sudden good grades aren’t enough to make her happy – much to her consternation.

Is Haru a bit of a stylized manic pixie dream boy? Perhaps, if you ignore all the domestic violence. The guy is equal parts five-year-old, brawler, and math whiz; a personality polymath. And Shizuku is the only one who seems to be able to handle him – hence all the chain imagery in the OP. But these two crazy kids and this episode reminded us of some of the best rom-com anime we’ve seen, from Whisper of the Heart (another bookworm Shizuku! Loves a guy she initially hates!) to Kare Kano (academic rivals gradually falling in love! lots of earnest inner monologue!) Also, it’s a Brain’s Base piece that looks and sounds great, and Tomatsu Haruka kills it as the voice of Shizuku.

Rating: 8 (Great)

Baby, Please Kill Me! – 06

Adventures in shaved dry ice, filthy pools, losing sight and sound, friends’ Japanese-style houses, being ditched in a park, typhoon-strength winds, Teru Teru Bouzu chains that resemble Ryujin, blackouts, and broken umbrellas.

Sonya is a normally very cautious and on-edge person, and Yasuna is only making it worse with her constant pranks or threats thereof. She doesn’t always mean to play pranks on Sonya, but she mixes enough attempts into her normal flights of whimsy to justify Sonya’s vigilance. If Yasuna doesn’t want her unconscious person left in the park, or smacked, she needs to avoid approaching an assassin from behind, and not set her up to put vegetable juice in her snow cone.

Agiri continues her role as prop comic with a ninja house of fairly pedestrian secrets, as well as a rocket that “makes it snow.” When Sonya enters a 7-Eleven, the series misses an opportunity to have her arrested, which could lead to and expose of her history as an assassin. Alas, her transgression was shrugged off without consequence.

Rating: 2.5