Not to belabor the point, but I truly believe that Osomatsu-san is at its best when it sets aside the darkness and goes for the heart.  And, of course, that it’s really good at it.  We’ve seen examples of this over and over in four cours of episodes, and I totally get why it doesn’t happen more often – these chapters have to be the exceptions in order to have the impact they do.  But it’s the possibility that one might turn up at any time that keeps me on my toes through all the absurdity that happens in-between.

Things start off innocently enough this week, with a straight-up comedy cold open (as most of them are) finding the boys making rather a drunken nuisance of themselves in a divey Chinese cafe.  The button gag is a good one (as usual Miyu-Miyu gets off the best version), though the ending is rather grim.  That’s followed by a number which finds Totty in female form, desperate to make some money and finding herself in the rather unsavory hands of Ichimatsu as the manager of a very strange club.  The whole “Banana” thing is distressingly less removed from reality than it really should be – those annoying trucks are everywhere in fashionable parts of Tokyo and weird clubs catering to strange fetishes abound (though “kissing an alligator” is a bit much).  This one has a surprisingly upbeat (depending on how you interpret it) ending, and we get yet another Miyu insert song to boot.

This is all preamble, though – the main event here is a rather weighty and quite involving story which finds a salesman showing up at the Matsuno estate to speak to the parents about something called “NEETZAP“.  NEETZAP is apparently some kind of rehab center/prison where NEETs are “rehabilitated” for two years before being sent out to (supposedly) be productive working adults (again, this doesn’t stray nearly as far from reality in Japan as it would be nice to believe).  It’s not surprising that Matsuyo-san is tempted by this charlatanism – it’s only natural, in fact.

There is humor in this chapter, absolutely – it’s actually a really good comic setup. But mostly what there is here is pathos, because it’s with this theme that Osomatsu-san really hits closest to the truth.  Matsuyo blames herself for her boys being shiftless and adrift – she sees the prison camp as a way to send a message, so she decides to send one of them off.  It made perfect sense to me that it would be Choromatsu she confides in first – he’s the most likely to sympathize with her perspective here (especially once she makes it clear he’s not the one that’s going).

It also made perfect sense to me that Choromatsu would immediately point at Osomatsu – while I find the whole idea of NEETZAP abhorrent, it’s always been clear to me that Osomatsu is the only true douchebag among the sextuplets, and Matsuyo’s instinct that it would be sending him that’s most likely to unsettle the others is probably on-point.  But it’s not that simple, because the truth of the matter is, Matsuyo doesn’t want to send any of her sons to this ridiculous place – they’re her sons.  They’re failures, and she has to be seriously worried about what will happen to them after she and Matsuzou are gone, but they’re still her boys.

All this eventually proves too much for Matsuyo, and she taps out.  And when Matsuzou comes home and announces that he’s going to send three of the boys to NEETZAP, it’s pretty obvious that it’s actually a fishing expedition.  And a highly successful one, as well as the funniest sequence of the episode.  The ending here is tragic and comic – Matsuyo falls back on her old bad parenting habits, and Matsuzou is too much of a soft touch to begin with – but honestly, how can one look at the unconditional love of parents for even deeply flawed children as anything but a heartwarming thing?  I’m not sure the story of the Matsuno brothers is going to have a happy ending, but in my view this episode definitely does.