Medalist Season 2

Episode 6

I mentioned last time that I was looking forward to seeing Inori and Hikaru training together since it would allow the former to properly measure herself against her idol, so I was pretty surprised when this episode ended with no meaningful interaction between them at all. Sure, they aren't exactly fated rivals at the moment, but considering how much Inori was looking forward to seeing her, you'd think we'd get to see them hold a single conversation before having Hikaru return to staying in the background. It's a strange narrative choice to be sure, but not enough to ruin the rest of the episode, because what it lacks in tense rivalry, it more than makes up for with good humor.

As she continues her training this week, a couple of things become very apparent to Inori. The first is that the current gap between her and Hikaru has nothing to do with her skill level, as now that she's made it onto the same playing field, Inori can now comprehend just how talented Hikaru truly is compared to the rest of their peers. The more pressing issue, however, is that out of all the girls participating in All-Japans, Inori is the only one who isn't capable of landing a triple flip or triple lutz. Since winning the last competition put a lot of eyes on her, this puts Inori in an awkward spot, and while Hikaru remains something of an enigma when it comes to how she perceives Inori, the look of disappointment on her face after watching Inori fail all her jumps during practice suggests she's less than pleased with her progress, and leaves without saying anything to her.

It's not a total disaster, though, as Inori's failures give her the chance to make friends with another girl named Main, who turns out to be a big fan of Inori's sister Mika, and the two of them bond almost immediately by geeking out about her. However, Main's not the only one who knows about Mika, as finding out they're sisters also earns Inori the attention of an older girl named Iruka. We were briefly introduced to her last week as a grumpy teenager annoyed at the prospect of having to practice with little kids, but the second she hears Mika's name, she directs all her antagonism towards Inori, commenting on how she has a lot in common with her sister when it comes to being both cute and bad at jumps. At the moment, we don't know if Iruka is a former rival of Mika's or a former fan of hers disappointed at how she stopped skating after getting injured (though given the “cute” remark here, I'm banking on the latter)

This sudden disrespect causes Inori to get defensive of her sister. However, while I was expecting this confrontation to be purely dramatic, it somehow manages to make a hard pivot into comedy when Inori's way of showing that both she and her sister are great at jumps is to show off her abs, which is a gag so absurd it was hard not to start uncontrollably bursting into laughter the same way Iruka does after this gun show. This bit diffuses the tension between them for the moment, but I imagine it won't be long before Iruka makes another appearance, and given how she's behaved, I'm pretty curious to learn just what her connection to Mika actually is.

The rest of the episode is mostly dedicated to Inori practicing her jumps, and while there's only so much entertainment to be derived from that, it does at least manage to crank a few more solid gags out of it. I got a good kick out of Tsukasa trying to give Inori a frame of reference by performing jumps for her and being disappointed when she acts unimpressed, only for us to discover that Inori is losing her mind with excitement internally while convincing herself that if she doesn't play it cool, he'll get tired of doing them. It was also pretty funny when Tsukasa tries to take advantage of Inori's current fame to get her a coach that specializes in jumps, and meeting said coach only to find out he's so babyfaced he could be mistaken for a teenager despite being older than he is. These kinds of jokes about characters looking younger than they are don't do anything for me normally, but we don't get too many male variants of that, and since his training methods involve the use of a harness for stability, it's hard not to chuckle at least a little at watching him use it to help lift Tsukasa through the air like a baby when showing how it works. Fun as this all was, though, I do still kind of wish we'd gotten a major interaction between Inori and Hikaru. Even if it didn't happen this time around, I'm still holding out on getting one before the rest of this season is through.

Rating:

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Medalist Season 2 is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.