Fun fact – the seiyuu playing Kawamata Sanae is named Osanai. Unfortunately that may just be my favorite part of this episode. Honestly compels me to admit that Shoushimin Series really hasn’t worked for me on the whole. But even within that context, I think I liked it better when it was about nothing. Because silliness about nothing grates on me less than silliness about something trying to be serious.

More than anything, I find this series to be self-indulgent. And I’m sorry to keep comparing it to Hyouka but they’re the same author and structurally pretty similar, so I think comparisons are both unavoidable and fair game. I don’t deny that Hyouka could be self-indulgent, but there was a core of something meaningful to it. It was really about the experience of being a smart teenager ultimately disconnected from what the world expects of you. Shoushimin is really just a lot of ridiculous plot contrivances cobbled together to form so-called mysteries that are either so obvious you solve them way before the so-called genius detective, or just make no sense at all and could in actuality never be figured out by anybody.

Given all that maybe it’s a surprise that I don’t hate this show, which I don’t. I admire the ballsiness of it I suppose, its determination to just ramble on without a care in the world what kind of impression it makes. It’s cheeky in a kind of endearing way, too. Plus there’s a certain fascination in just how twisted Yuki is, and how far ahead she is of Kobato at every turn. Even assuming it were possible for her to neatly orchestrate this entire summer to the letter the way she did (it’s not), it takes a very cold and disturbed person to put innocents through what she put the guys through.

So does any of it mean anything, in the final analysis – the whole “trying to be ordinary” conceit? Jougorou is, to be blunt, already more ordinary than not – just a slight bit more clever. And Osanai is making no attempt to be ordinary at all, quite the opposite. Which in a sense is sort of mocking him, actually. I guess we have one more episode in which to find out, but I’m not sure I want the series to go there and I’m not sure it will. I think trying to explain this premise away at the death would be a doomed exercise from the beginning, and they’d probably be better off finishing with an episode about Pocky or something.