Going into this episode I was feeling pretty good that Bakuten was going to make the cut.  The schedule falls kindly for it, airing as it does on one of the very few slow nights of the week.  The first two episodes were quite good, if hardly revolutionary.  I still may well end up covering it, and I’ll certainly be watching for the foreseeable future. But truth be told this ep wasn’t quite on par with the first two, which plants a little seed of doubt about Bakuten’s staying power.

What went wrong?  Well, things just didn’t click for me generally.  Shoutarou sucking (albeit understandably) and stressing over it felt like a recycled plotline.  There were a lot of attempts at humor this time too, and most of them didn’t do much for me.  It’s the sort of comedy that’s a bit too obviously desperate for you to love it.  And then there’s the new (though we met him briefly before) cast member Tsukiyuki Mashiro from Hakumei High, who kind of dominated the episode.  I wanted to like him but I found his presence pretty grating.

It’s only too fitting, I suppose, that we should have Hinata Shouyou’s seiyuu slide into a prominent role next to Kageyama Tobio’s.  It’s not like they’re trying to hide their intentions with this show to say the least.  Murase Ayumu is a good actor, at times very good indeed, and Shouyou is an excellent performance.  Mashiro however is not, at least for me.  It’s a very affected performance here, where Shouyou’s is natural – again, that trying too hard thing.  As floppy-eared beagle as it is, I rarely got that feeling from Haikyuu – it’s simply being what it is, and likability is a by-product of that.  Here, it’s starting to feel pretty calculated.

On the one hand, this could just be an off week – even good shows have them.  The introduction of the Hakumei rhythmic gymnastics team (I guess a training camp arc was inevitable sooner or later) could still prove to be a net positive by diversifying the cast (important, as Shoutatou and Misato’s sempais are still kind of a cipher).   But my worry is whether Bakuten has enough cards in the deck to keep things evolving for 12 episodes, preventing recycling from being an ongoing issue.

I’m not going to draw any conclusions based on one episode, especially when it was mostly setup.  Some doubts are creeping in but doubts can be dispelled.  And there are a still a lot of potential subplots to be explored, perhaps most prominently the matter of just what’s going on in Misato’s private life (and who was the girl with him who had a very nee-chan vibe?).  As for the action sequences we continue to see a big bump in CGI for those, but it’s good enough not to prove a major distraction for me, much less a deal-breaker.  I want this show to succeed – more good sports anime is something I will always root for – but wishing doesn’t make it so.  For now all I can do is stay tuned and stay positive.