Assassination Classroom season 2

Episode 6

This one could've been bad. Class E acting as mentors to a bunch of preschool kids after accidentally injuring an old guy on a bicycle? Just thinking about it conjures up underwhelming visions of cheap emotional appeals and painfully obvious morals. The good news is that this is Assassination Classroom, and the writing in this show is good enough to turn a potentially dull and sappy story into an entertaining and occasionally insightful episode. Score one for careful plotting and smooth execution.

This episode starts off with Class E discovering a new use for all of the physical training they've been doing. If you can jump from building to building in pursuit of an enemy, why not do it to save some time on your commute to school? The answer comes all too quickly when a botched landing ends with an injured old man and a whole mess of trouble for the high-flying students. After a tense lecture on using one's abilities responsibly, the class fills in for their accidental victim by helping out at the preschool that he runs. By the time their two weeks of penance are up, they manage to completely renovate the run-down building and impart some useful lessons to the kids. The only problem is that those two weeks were also the last two weeks before midterms, and nearly everyone ends up with lousy scores. The one exception is Karma, who redeems himself for slacking off on the last round of exams by getting the second highest score in the school, much to the annoyance of Class A.

While the premise may sound like a recipe for a tired and preachy episode about Class E learning some responsibility, things actually start off on a strong note. It's been a while since we've seen Koro Sensei as angry as he gets at the hospital, and his words cut deep for the class of misfits. As the big guy points out, they've become too impressed with their own abilities and failed to think about how their actions might affect people weaker than them. They have, in effect, imitated the kind of privileged carelessness that makes the students on the school's main campus so easy to hate. The series makes a point of emphasizing the moment when this realization sinks in, and it's an effective way of adding some emotional depth to the story.

After that, most of the episode is about what you'd expect from dropping Class E into a piranha pit of rowdy little kids. There are some amusing visuals of the preschoolers inflicting all kinds of misery on their newfound victims, after which our heroes pull it together and start finding ways to contain the chaos. There's a pleasant little storyline about Nagisa mentoring a girl who should've aged out of the preschool already, and she eventually manages to overcome her troubles at elementary school in a very Class E way. The scene where Koro Sensei reveals the newly renovated building to the elderly principal is a comedic highlight, and anyone who's sat through a home improvement show will get a kick out of Assassination Classroom's take on the overly sappy “before and after” sequence.

The focus shifts back to the latest round of midterms at the end of the episode, and it's here that the show impresses the most from a storytelling perspective. It would've been easy to have Class E ace the exams despite not getting time to study, wrapping the whole thing up with some shamelessly cheesy line about learning everything they need to know by helping others. Thankfully, the script has the good sense not to go there. The Class E kids get lousy grades on the exams, because of course they would after not studying. If everything had wrapped up neatly, there would've been no appreciable cost to their misuse of training at the beginning of the episode. So instead, they have to stand there and listen to the Class A students brag about their high scores. But since that would be a depressing way to end things, Assassination Classroom finds a loophole. In a reversal of the final exam arc from last season, Karma is the only one in Class E who makes time to study. He gets redemption for his past mistakes, and we get the satisfaction of seeing at least one person stick it to Class A.

With all of this delivered in a 25-minute package, we get a light but amusing little story bookended by a couple of really solid scenes. It's a reminder that Assassination Classroom can do some very good work when it puts a little extra care into its writing. If it can manage to sneak a few of these smart scenes into a plotline with some more dramatic weight behind it, then it'll be golden. With Class E obviously gearing up for a serious attempt at killing Koro Sensei, the show has a convenient opportunity to do exactly that.

Rating: B+

Assassination Classroom is currently streaming on Funimation.

Paul Jensen is a freelance writer and editor. You can follow more of his anime-related ramblings on Twitter.