Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu Ni! – 12

So I guess we’re pretending that last episode didn’t happen?

I guess I shouldn’t complain, because this was a sort of funny episode and at least it didn’t leave me unutterably pissed off at Baka Test like the last few have.  I’m just astonished at how randomly these eps seem to have been strung together, though.  What’s the thinking there, I wonder?  It’s hard to imagine Shin-sensei or any of the writers actually sat down and decided this would be the order that makes sense.  And I know they didn’t simply follow the order from the novels.  So my curiosity really is piquéd at the question of how this all happened.

For all that, we had a moderately funny episodes that featured some actual summoning and while not a classic, wouldn’t have aroused suspicious if you’d plunked it down in the middle of the first season.  Summonings gone awry are always a goldmine of laughs for this series – the talking shoukanjuu who spoke their summoner’s subconscious desires were the best moment of the season so far – and they provided some good material this week.  This was a somewhat similar notion, with the summoned beings representing the true nature of their masters.  Voyeur as a vampire, Himeji as a big-breasted trampy fox-girl, Yuuji as a werewolf, all gold – but the highlight for me was Minami’s shoukanjuu as a huge flat board.  That was the first time B-T has really made me LOL in months.

Of course good moments were mined from Hideyoshi as well.  With the plot being a contest between the third and second-years, with the seniors tasked to terrify their juniors into screaming and disqualifying themselves, it was only a matter of time before cross-dressing and Hidesexuality would factor in.  The “summerfags” – the two assholes from the OVA – were the ringleaders for the third-years, and the crewcut kid provided the counterpoint to Hideyoshi for what’s really possible in the world of traps.  I loved the fact that Hideyoshi was a nekomimi while Yuuko was a full-fledged cat, but the highlight was the love poem one of the senior boys wrote to Hideyoshi, “The Sun and the Sunflower”.  I also loved the fact that one of the extras actually had “extra” written on his face.

It looks like the season will conclude with the remainder of this battle, which at least means we’re unlikely to be burdened with any further grossly misplaced flashback episodes or outright sadism-fests.  It’s nothing spectacular but at least it feels like the same show I was watching last year.  I’m sure there’ll be a third season of this at some point, and I certainly hope it resembles the first a lot more than this one.  One more week and we can put this unfortunate mess behind us and hopefully start fresh, because I’d really like to be a fan of this series again.