Once more Ace of Diamond creeps forward and looks backward.

Let me just begin this post by apologizing for its brevity.  My sisters are visiting from America, and as luck would have it, on the day of their arrival I finally caught the cold that’s been sweeping though my school at breakneck speed.  As such, posts are going to be shorter than usual for a little while, and possible slightly later too.

Onto the episode itself, it’s another flashback – this time to the arrival of the current first-years at Seidou and their initial trials and tribulations.  It’s nice to see these guys get some fleshing out as they’re not an especially distinctive bunch (“Ugah!” is not character development), but the overall feeling here – though this ep is manga canon – is that the main idea was to get the start of the Inashiro game to fall on the first ep of the Fall season.

Looking back, nothing surprised me too much about the first years of the third-years – perhaps the most interesting element was seeing how much more of a hardass Kataoka was (he was already keen on bathing with young boys, though).  More importantly, still no answer to the big question of the plan for the pitching staff, and no sign that Chekov’s ankle is about to be played.  Stay tuned.