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Grand Blue Dreaming
Episode 5

by James Beckett,

How would you rate episode 5 of
Grand Blue Dreaming ?
Community score: 3.8

Last week showed us that even a powerhouse like Asobi Asobase is prone to stumble when it's throwing every crazy idea it has at the wall to see what sticks. Grand Blue Dreaming has Asobi Asobase's anarchic spirit, but it's much shoddier in execution, and given how shamelessly it wields its particular brand of abrasive humor, all it takes is for the show to commit to one haphazard comedic conceit to find itself in a tailspin. Unfortunately, “Too Late” is the episode where Grand Blue Dreaming finds that one wrong idea and runs with it.

The general premise is as much of a sitcom staple as we've seen from the show so far. The other boys in Iori and Kouhei's class are furious because Chisa has led them to believe that she's dating Iori. While this gets the men off Chisa's back, it puts Iori and Kouhei right in the middle of the school's crosshairs, so much so that the pair start receiving literal death threats for daring to be the underwear-flaunting weirdos who would take the prettiest girl in class away from them. It's a stock gag, and the show's penchant for taking situations to their most extreme doesn't really pay off; we don't know any of these guys from Adam, so there's no juxtaposition to be found in watching them plot the finer points of our heroes' imminent deaths. They just come across as unnecessarily violent and crazed.

This is the context in which we are introduced to two particular incensed classmates, Nojima and Yamamoto, which doesn't exactly make for the best first impression. Nojima and Yamamoto freak Iori and Kouhei out enough that the latter pair promises to invite the former pair along for a mixer, which sees Iori and Kouhei running to Azusa to find female friends to bring to the date. The only real joke between all of this plot setup is that the one friend that Azusa scrounges up, a pretty and unassuming young woman with short blue hair, is actually Aina from last week without all the excessive makeup on. It's an okay joke in and of itself, but it's when Aina promises to invite her friends to the mixer that the episode takes a real downturn.

There are many problems with this episode's second half, and they begin with Nojima and Yamamoto themselves, who are just too generic to stand out amongst the rest of the show's cast; they're essentially the same character type as Iori, sans the habit of getting naked all the time, except Yamamoto is given the singular trait of not being picky about girls because he's hell-bent on losing his virginity. This is immediately complicated by the fact that Aina and all of her friends are decked out in the exact kind of garish makeup that had the guys calling Aina “Cakey” so much last week, which inspires abject horror and disgust in everyone but Yamamoto.

It must be noted that the final scene of the episode confirms that Aina and her friends are just trying to pull a fast one on the guys and teach them a lesson about being so judgmental, given that they're all pretty weird dudes themselves. The problem is that none of the humor is framed in the context of karmic punishment, at least not strongly enough to rise above all the screaming and ugly reaction faces. For much of the mixer segment, the main joke is that the guys think the girls look hideous, and that Yamamoto is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to want to sleep with any of them. Then the gears shift when the guys see a picture that shows how pretty the girls are when they aren't decked out in pounds of makeup, leaving all four guys scrambling to seduce them and make fools of themselves. There is a lot of screaming and yelling, none of which is particularly funny, and the episode's animation is quite bad throughout, with many of the segments amping up the screaming while reducing the visuals to little more than slide-shows.

Grand Blue Dreaming is self-aware enough to realize that its lead characters are acting like insufferable assholes, but it isn't skilled enough to frame its jokes in a way that don't still feel mean-spirited. This makes the jokes more predictable, and as a result the laughs just aren't there. The whole latter segment is essentially playing straight the dumb macho selfishness that the most recent episode managed to subvert somewhat. At the end of the episode, a clearly infatuated Aina asks the other girls if it's right to be in love with a guy who is nice to a girl no matter what she looks like. The problem is that, based on parts of last week's episode and most of this one, Iori doesn't seem to be that kind of person at all.

Stifler, the breakout character of the American Pie movies, was a sex-crazed, foul-mouthed pig who was tolerable in small doses, but became almost insufferable when he began to take up more screen-time in the films. Watching “Too Late” was akin to watching four different Stiflers bumble around being annoying and gross, and a last-minute admission to being in on the joke doesn't make the episode any funnier. I'm not saying I want Grand Blue Dreaming to be less crass, or willfully dumb, or absurd. I just expect the show to be better at doing all that.

Rating: C-

Grand Blue Dreaming is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.


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