Things got off to a patchy start this week, and sadly never really got better.  One bad episode doesn’t necessarily spell doom, but I admit I worry a lot more with a LN adaptation like Bokutachi no Remake because, well, history is what it is.  And my history has been that while some of them keep me invested for a few eps, almost all of them crap out sooner or later.  That makes next week’s episode a flat-out crucial one pretty much any way you slice it.

That bikini thing in the cold open was dumb of course, but even the first three eps had their share of cliche moments like that.  They’re an annoyance and a drag chute but so far, not a deal-breaker.  Of greater concern to me was that the whole premise of this episode whiffed with me, as did the way it was executed.  That whole karaoke thing was groan-inducing, but the idea that Eiko would listen to one bad karaoke number and then dismember Nanako’s life story was totally ludicrous.

First of all, I don’t buy for a minute that any person is going to get that upset about something like this.  Nanako isn’t pursuing her passion seriously, so I’m going to flip out?  And second of all, Eiko deduces her entire soliloquy’s worth of judgment from two minutes of a Judy and Mary cover? I ge that Eiko is supposed to be both really smart and really judgmental, but come on, man – that’s just silly.

The only part of the episode that was marginally interesting was the bit with the loli-sempai (though the character itself was pretty silly to begin with) because we start to see Kyouya’s life follow the same track it was on before.  There’s an element of “to thine own self be true” to that, even though he does turn down her offer to direct a project at her doujinsoft group.  The premise remains interesting with Bokutachi no Remake – the devil is sometimes in the details.  It would suck to see this show crash and burn with so little else going on, but that possibility was always on the table.  Episode #5 is going to tell us a lot.