I was all set to write a post about how Osomatsu-san has fully embraced its avant-garde, anti-comedy status.  That’s certainly been the trend for the second cour of the second season – the tone generally more serious, the comedy more experimental, the chapters longer and more plot-driven.  And this episode was perhaps the most “serious”, most linear and most conventional premise of any Osomatsu-san episode so far.

But then I remembered the first season.  In case you don’t, it came in with a super-somber penultimate episode (more correctly, half-episode) which ended in a “Tsuzkuku” and left the series in its most serious place to date when it happened.  Then it came back with an utterly bizarre final episode that not only tore up the notion of a serious finale in the first two minutes, but seemed intent on topping the incredibly outlandish first season in sheer outlandishness.  Even if I predicted that would happen I was a bit let down by it – that felt like the easy way out.

So is there any reason to think that won’t happen again this time?  Well, it seems unlikely – but I wouldn’t totally rule it out.  First of all there’s at least a chance that this “final episode” will actually be the final episode – and that was never even a remote possibility when the first season ended.  It almost seems as if the creatives have been salting the ground with this final run of episodes, trying to turn off enough fans to make the imperative for a third season less financially persuasive.  At the very least they seem to be working with the creative freedom of men playing with house money – they’ll finish this season and this series however they want, and everyone who was ever involved with Osomatsu-san will still wind up way ahead of the game.

Like last season’s pre-finale, this one focuses on Osomatsu – which is actually a relative rarity with this series (as he is the boring one).  However, this time around instead of being an abject douchebag (even more than usual) Osomatsu is the one who steps up.  He actually acts like a big brother for once when Matsuzou has a medical emergency.  All the boys are devastated of course when their dad goes to the hospital, but it’s Osomatsu who forces them to confront the truth – it’s their shiftlessness and selfishness that’s helped put him there.  And both for they and their mother, the future suddenly looks very frightening.

The future – theirs and their parents – does indeed depend on the sextuplets, though that’s something this series has almost never confronted head-on.  But Osomatsu has said what all of them were thinking, and the inevitable can’t be put off any longer – they need to become responsible, or face very serious consequences (and not from their parents, who are non-judgmental literally to a fault).  Seeing the boys step up, first around the house and then in getting menial jobs, is certainly a serious and impactful turn for Osomatsu-san.  But the real pathos here comes in Osomatsu’s sober reflection on what’s been lost – for all that it was a fantasy existence, what the brothers had was special in its own way.  And if they become “proper”, it can never exist again.

The fact is – and always had been – that the premise of Osomatsu-san is loaded with weighty elements that are always waiting to be explored, should the show ever do so.  It could even be taken as a parable on modern Japan, though we don’t need to get that lugubrious about it.  It’s once again in the hands of Fujita and Matsubara to decide whether they want to take that ball and run with it in the finale – they pretty much punted the first time around when given the chance.  I once more find myself hoping they take up the challenge, but we’ll find out next week.