With last week’s little detour in the rear-view mirror, Boku no Hero Academia returns straight to the action (well – after another too-long recap, though I guess with a week break it’s not the worst time to have one) of the provisional license exam.  While this isn’t as “serious” as the Stain confrontation or the All For One showdown, what with no one’s life on the line (hey, we even managed to get through a school activity without any obvious hijacking by villains) for the students this is still a pretty damn big deal.  Their immediate futures pretty much hinge on it, and it’s by no means irrelevant to their long-term prospects too.

I was glad Horikoshi (and Bones) took a few moments to cast this exam in context.  It’s easy to forget how much the world of BnHA changed after the “retirement” of All Might.  Everyone – including the Public Safety Commission, who are the drivers behind this exam – are in a bit of a panic.  They know all too well you can’t replace the likes of All Might, who was a perfect storm of a hero – not only the most powerful, but the most charismatic.  If anyone was ever custom built to be the symbol of peace, it was Toshinori Yagi, that rarest of combinations – both a great man and a good one.

Thus, the design of this phase of the exam.  Rather than focus on raw power or even hero skills, it focuses on cooperation.  The test here is to see how ready these kids are to function as heroes in the real world, and the new world they’re soon entering is one where the emphasis is on unity rather than a cult of personality built around one man (this is not by choice, mind you, but necessity).  Even the examiners think this second phase might just be too difficult, but again it all comes back to the PSC and the Hero Association being in panic mode.

If that is indeed the measure, than there can be no question that both Todoroki and Inasa Yoarashi failed pretty miserably.  The nature of the scoring here is very simple – every cadet starts with 100 points.  They get points taken away for every mistake – more for colossal screwups, a few for small ones.  Crucially, once points are lost there’s no way to win them back – the countdown only moves one way, and if it drops below 50 points they fail.  That makes the difficulty of the challenge placed before them – deal with a rescue with simultaneously fighting off a Top 10 hero and his gang of henchmen – all the more seemingly unfair.

For all their freakish talent, these are still kids, and even the more seemingly mature ones are prone to lapses in judgment.  But for Shouto and Yoarashi, this is pretty much abject failure.  There’s a personal grudge here – for Yoarashi it’s Endeavor who’s the issue (one imagines there must be a lot of Endeavor haters out there, pissed off by him over the years).  That and the fact that Shouto’s behavior at the Yuuei entrance exam eerily echoed the arrogant callousness of his father.  For Todoroki it’s the mere fact of being compared to his father that’s the trigger.  But whatever the reason, not only do those two get in each other’s way when they have seemingly complementary quirks, they actually lapse into arguing with each other in front of the villain.  I don’t care what scoring system you use, that can’t be good.

Amazingly, Midoriya-kun has to detour from rescuing victims to rescuing Shindo from a wayward blast of Shouto’s fire blown towards him by Inasa’s wind.  This is about as pissed as we’ve ever seen Izuku, who’s very much an “eyes on the prize” sort of guy under pressure, but then gauging how these children respond under pressure is really the point of the test.  Shindo is pretty cheesed off too I might add, given that needing rescue doesn’t exactly make him look good.  In point of fact Midoriya actually returns to try and protect Todoroki and Yoarashi from Gang Orca after their last-ditch attempt to salvage the situation fails to bring him to heel, but the bell rings just as he engages with Gang Orca (with a quite powerful surprise attack).

The results are flashed on the jumbotron just as the episode comes to an end, but we’re still left with a lot of questions.  Will Shouto and Inasa’s late recovery be enough to overshadow their grievous boner?  Will having to divert from his real job cost Deku too many points?  How much did Bakugo’s outburst at the victims cost him?  Not to mention that there are a good deal of U.A. students whose performance during this round was barely touched on – we have no idea if they did enough to survive.  Much of this, it seems to me, comes down to the question of whether the examiners (mostly the PSC) are going to judge the applicants strictly on performance, or also on potential.  I know what certain candidates will be hoping, that’s for sure…