Give Sukitte some credit for this: it never misses its cues.

My feelings about Megu-tan as summarized in last week’s post:

I don’t wish her any ill, but I just don’t care about her very much and and her likely tearful redemption next week seems like an anti-climactic way to end the series.

And therein lies the problem with Sukitte, really – change a few of the particulars and you could pretty much recycle anything you said about the last few episodes.  Ultimately this show is just too predictable and obedient to the rules of the game to be really interesting.  Rewarding, likeable, simply pretty good – sure.  There are still lots of things about this show to recommend it, and the sins it commits are pardonable compared to a lot of what we see out there in anime.  But from my perspective, this last arc has been the least rewarding of the series by a good margin.

In fact, I was unclear right up until the last seconds of the preview whether this episode represented the end of the series of not.  I was sure there was a 13th coming but this had all the earmarks of a benediction – Megu’s redemption had been realized, Mei got to wear her yukata, we even had fireworks – and there was a tender kiss and declaration of love written in the stars (well, written anyway) between she and Yamato.  Not only that, we had the end credits rolling over a montage of the various characters.  In short, all the boxes had been checked.  But we do indeed have one more episode to go, though I wonder if it will be either comedic or a generally reflective one, as there’s only one major event that could still happen (well – two if you count Megu and Kai becoming a couple) – and I don’t expect to see that.