×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Tanaka-kun is Always Listless
Episode 7

by Rebecca Silverman,

How would you rate episode 7 of
Tanaka-kun is Always Listless ?
Community score: 4.5

Mysterious boxes labeled with creepy notes. Tokens and assurances of constant vigilance from unknown sources. Voice recorders stealthily slipped into bags. All of it can only mean one thing: Valentine's Day. It really isn't Tanaka-kun's favorite holiday anyway, mostly because he knows that it will require effort on his part in a month – on March 14th, White Day, he'll have to reciprocate and give the girl(s) who gave him chocolate a present. That's just way too much effort for him, a guy who admits that he's “inappropriately curious” like other high school boys, but doing something about it is just too much trouble.

So naturally this week's episode kicks off with Tanaka finding a mysterious box of chocolates in his bag, complete with a note written in words cut out from magazines that says, “I'm always watching you.” There's also an after-thought bar of dark chocolate for Ohta, so there are any number of…okay, there are two possible candidates, especially since Tanaka's chocolates turn out to be homemade: Shiraishi or Miyano. So the boys low-key stalk them, only to find out that both of them forgot that it's Valentine's Day, plus Miyano sees herself as a disciple to Tanaka anyway, so she was more likely to make him an offering than to give a present. Who could the mysterious gifter be?

Honestly this is a bit more of a drawn-out episode than it needs to be, and while it does still have some really funny moments, it also doesn't quite measure up to the absurdity bar set by previous weeks. Probably the highlight (apart from the moment when Tanaka opens the note, which is great) is in the last quarter of the show, when we meet Tanaka's sister, rino. rino, as you might have guessed, looks just like her brother, but there's something very different about her personality. Where Tanaka-kun is listless, rino is organized and sets clear goals for herself, like cleaning all of the leather shoes in the house or tormenting Ohta. Apparently she's jealous of how much time her brother spends with him, and she has some definite ulterior motives when she invites him over for “tea.” rino's like the anti-Tanaka, using her apparent emotionless face for evil instead of laziness. Also, she's apparently been paying far more attention to Ohta than she ought to have, because she really seems to know a lot about him, to say nothing of having devoted hours to thinking up nicknames he'd hate.

Watching rino's smooth, calm facial expression be at odds with her actions and words is definitely entertaining, even if it isn't quite enough to carry the episode, and it stands out with a few other particularly good visual moments as little highlights this week. The coffee she makes for Ohta looks bitter – something in the quality of the color and the viscosity of the liquid makes you almost able to taste the nastiness from looking at it. Early in the episode, before we learn that it is February, Tanaka-kun complains about it being cold, and his hands, still wet from washing them in the bathroom, have little drops of water that don't fall from him fingertips, as if they are on the verge of freezing in place. These more subtle moments are just as good as the Buddha faces the boys feel Miyano pictures them with or the glide backwards Tanaka does when he spots the box of chocolates in his bag, both bigger, arguably more important scenes but somehow not quite as striking as the little ones.

Not all shows can be consistently funny every week, and Tanaka-kun is Always Listless is no exception. But even when it's kind of dragging, like this week, it still has several chuckle-out-loud moments and a general air of easy-going entertainment that make it a really nice break after, for example, grading four classes worth of essays. While I'd love for it to be hysterical every week, it still fulfills its promise of light fun in this episode, and I'm looking forward to seeing what tribulations Ohta will face next week…and how much rino has to do with them.

Rating: B

Tanaka-kun is Always Listless is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.


discuss this in the forum (86 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

back to Tanaka-kun is Always Listless
Episode Review homepage / archives