Haikyu!! Second Season

Episode 7

Tsukki fans, your episode has come. This episode takes us back to Tokyo to see how the Karasuno boys fare now that they've all been training, and while the answer to that question is “not well,” more focus is given to the one guy who didn't spend two weeks honing his skills: Tsukishima. The tall, bespectacled, and broody member of Karasuno's team has taken a backseat thus far this season, so giving him the larger portion of the action feels like a nice change of pace, but more importantly, it gives us some idea of why he's such a grumpy, withdrawn character. As the episode proceeds, we learn that there is likely a family issue behind his lack of enthusiasm and team spirit (Tanaka's sister thinks she remembers a tall Tsukishima on the volleyball team when she was at Karasuno), but more importantly, that he harbors feelings of insecurity and inferiority under his cold exterior, and that, ultimately, he's less stand-offish than afraid.

On the one hand, Tsukishima is voicing some of the criticisms that more cynical viewers may have of the show, as well as of the sports genre in general. If Hinata is such an amazing player with heaps of God-given talent, then why should any other middle blockers even try to keep up with him? If he's so good, doesn't that just make practice an exercise in futility? And why is everyone so intense about this anyway? It's just high school volleyball, and a club even, rather than a professional team. They're all just going to graduate and move on with their lives anyway. While it is sad to hear Tsukishima thinking these things juxtaposed with shots of how hard everyone else is working, including his buddy Yamaguchi, who barely gets any screen time ever, it also says a lot about how successful Haikyu!! is in general, as it takes having a character like Tsukishima tell us the issues to really make us pay attention to them. What's more important, though, is that we and all of the other players can see him just going through the motions, bogged down in the morass of his own feelings.

Granted, being a teenager is often a case of drowning in your larger-than-life emotions, but this episode (and Haikyu!! in general) is more concerned with how that can create missed opportunities or problems in general for its characters. When we see Tsukishima half-heartedly serving (it really looks more like half-assedly, actually) and the coach says that he may have to take him off the roster of regular players, there's a moment of panicked sadness – this was the cocky guy who came charging in at the start of season one. How did he fall to this point without us really noticing? If we look back at just this season, we can see him really taking things hard, assuming that if Hinata and Kageyama, with their much-vaunted natural talent, couldn't pull things together in the previous season's games, there's no way that a guy with just his height could do it. In fact, most of what we hear people saying about him is that he's tall and wears glasses, as if those are his only remarkable features as a player. Where Asahi redoubled his efforts to retain his ace position and Sugawara found his other strengths as a member of the team once Kageyama became setter-in-chief, Tsukishima just sort of slowly crumbled internally. Because he's never been an emotive character and because he's a first year, it was easy to overlook the little details of his emotional collapse. The question is, can he reverse it?

Next week looks like it will continue to examine Tsukishima, and I find myself hoping that he can pull through it on his own or with the help of just Yamaguchi or possibly Kuroo, another team's ace. I feel as if the rest of the team pulling him up would be out of character for Tsukki. In any event, the joint plots of Tsukishima's breakdown and the rest of the group learning how to combine their new powers to form a strong whole work well together, and watching them move forward towards their ultimate goal is, if not always immediately rewarding, always worth paying attention to.

Rating: A-

Haikyu!! Second Season is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.