I’m pretty sure this won’t be the first time I’ve said it (and this season), but I figure if you’re still hanging with Mix you’re kind of all-in at this point.  Adachi’s ball game is so particular to him you really can’t mistake it for anything else.  He absolutely drives you crazy sometimes but in such a way that it’s hard not to laugh.  The things you wish were different are pretty much the same things that make an Adachi series what it is.  Take them away and all you’d have left is an empty box.

I’m probably just at the edge of starting to get irritated that the Harada situation has persisted as long as it has.  The irony of Adachi inserting a “the author has to keep things moving along in snappy fashion” joke – one of a veritable Niagara of fourth wall breaches this week – is not lost on me.  I think it’s one of the most interesting threads in Mix, but all the false alarms and near misses are starting to stretch the point.  I really thought when Harada saw Touma and Otomi’s silhouettes and thought of Tatsuya and Minami (surely that’s their longest appearance yet) that the dam was going to be breached – but nope.

The false alarm was a big one, and Senbongi-sensei was at the heart of it.  We know his connection to Sawai-san, and given that there was only a time gap of a few years, it’s not totally unrealistic to imagine he and Harada could have crossed paths at some point.  But that whole story about meeting in India and hitchhiking together sounds like a case of mistaken identity on Senbongi’s part (and yet another small world coincidence).  We got another Nishimura near-miss too.  I’m ready for this amnesia thing to be over – I want to see what a fully-aware Harads does to impact the plot.

Meanwhile Touma and Otomi (after flashing Harada) run into Ooyama’s wife Midori, whose baseball romcom has been serialized and who’s desperate for ideas.  She picks up Touma and Otomi and winds up grilling them over sushi (and not kaiten either).  On the way they see Souichirou and Haruka seemingly fighting on the street, ending with Haruka appearing to slap him.  The step-siblings make an executive decision to pretend they didn’t see anything, and Haruka’s mother doesn’t seem too worried about it.

Of course, any appearance by Midori is an excuse for Adachi to go nuts with the self-referential and self-deprecating humor, and this ep is no exception.  I especially liked that “who asked you” bumper sticker on the truck (after “series that were popular decades ago get continuations”).  The whole Haruka-Souichirou slap thing is mostly played for laughs.  It didn’t immediately strike me (no pun intended) that it was a play, though I obviously caught on when I heard her talking to herself in the clubroom.  All this talk of romcom tropes certainly continues to point in a Touma-Otomi direction, but there’s definitely a wall of resistance in Touma (and maybe there should be) that must be breached before it can really go any further.