High School Fleet

Episode 10

When High School Fleet decides to take it easy for a week, it really goes all in. To heck with all those sea battles, it's party time! With the Harekaze in the midst of repairs after its fight with the Admiral Spee, the ship's chief engineer Maron decides it's time to hold a festival to celebrate crossing the Equator. It take a while to get the crew motivated for such an elaborate approach to rest and relaxation, and the normally energetic Maron spends some time sulking when the rest of the girls seem more interested in slacking off. The crew eventually pulls together, setting up food stalls and putting on comedy acts. As everyone gets into the festival atmosphere, Akeno ponders the Harekaze's next mission: they'll be joining a group of ships in pursuit of the missing Musashi.

With side plots starting to wrap up and a big confrontation looming on the horizon, this doesn't seem like the best time for the show to take a comedic detour. Any dramatic momentum built up through the last few battles is lost as the characters go through a largely trouble-free episode. Hitting the narrative brakes now may not be a great idea, but it's also not the worst thing the show could've done. If High School Fleet really needed to have some silly downtime, better now than halfway through the inevitable search for the Musashi.

The closest thing we get to drama in this episode is a brief moment of high school angst when Maron decides that no one is taking the festival seriously enough, and even that doesn't last long. The series makes the reasonable decision to wrap up its emotional turn in a hurry and dive into the festival as quickly as possible. A few of the crew's comedy acts put the show's premise to good use, with the artillery crew geeking out over cannon impressions and the bridge crew staging a goofy one-act play. Setting all of this on board the Harekaze also makes for some amusingly bizarre visuals, as the color and motion of the festival contrasts with the ship's gray metal hull. It's this odd contrast that often makes these kinds of shows entertaining despite (or perhaps because of) their inherent absurdity.

The larger plot isn't completely abandoned here, with a couple of scenes offering some information on how the Blue Mermaids and the school fleet are dealing with the mysterious infection. If this approach of putting the Harekaze's adventures on hold to fill in the big picture seems familiar, it's because the show has used it before. High School Fleet seems to have trouble mixing world building and exposition with action scenes, so the more talkative portions of the show tend to override the sea battles. It's not a terrible way to do things, and most shows do it to one extent or another, but I still wish High School Fleet could find a way to give the audience new information without slowing down the pace so much. We're here for the battleships, gosh darn it!

There's some fun content in here, and this episode makes for easy viewing in the moment. It's just a little too inconsequential for its own good and would be more at home in a slice of life series without a serious plot to worry about. Given High School Fleet's penchant for more action, an episode like this near the end of the season just isn't the best use of the show's finite screen time.

Rating: B-

High School Fleet is currently streaming on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Daisuki.

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