Wash It All Away

Episode 9

It's finally the beginning of March. The snow from January and February's nasty blizzards has finally melted away, but there's still a damp, cloudy grayness blanketing the skies. Winter's final dying weeks were never exactly scenic around my area, and don't have much in the way of cheer as one waits for the warm glow of the spring sun to rise again. We're supposed to have a few nights of rain this week, too. Fitting, since this week's episode of Wash It All Away centers around a dreary, rainy day. On the plus side, not much happens. On the negative...not much happens. Or rather, at least nothing dramatic.

Wash It All Away has always had a sense of ASMR-ness to it, and it reaches a new peak with this episode. Tonally, it plays out like one of those rainy day simulators that you use to lull yourself to sleep at night. A storm causes a power outage, leaving Kinme and Ryusho in the laundromat together, with nothing to do but sit it out. As a result, there's not much to really distract you here; you could play this episode in the background as you're doing other things, if you really wanted to.

The most exciting part of this episode comes when Kinme has to go outside to move a washing machine that the winds knocked over. Kinme and Ryusho have a candle-lit fish dinner together, chat, and have a sleepover. There's nothing too intimate or revealing about these scenes; they add more to the atmosphere than they do further the relationship between these two characters. I'll admit that their relationship is pretty underdeveloped given how far into the cour we are, although that's probably not the point here. It's another instance of mindless coziness, and I'll take what I can get.

The bottle-episode nature here means that the anime is left to pull usual tricks to help its twenty-minute runtime go by. Kinme is a ditz, meaning she's now afraid of lightning and ghosts. Weird, especially when she went scuba diving a few episodes ago. You mean to tell me that lightning sends shivers down her spine, but not the very real possibility of getting stung by a jellyfish (and I say this from experience)? The power eventually comes back on just in time for Kinme to do more laundry and bring up that she has amnesia for the umpteenth time. Apparently, Kinme's now suffering short-term memory loss too, since she's saying recent memories disappear into the void just as much as her memories from two years ago do. Oh, and there's fan service here and there. But you probably already knew that.

This episode is soothing and fine enough despite not leaving much on the table. Still, though, part of me feels that you could cut this episode out altogether. The last episode felt more vibrant and developed, and Uka's introduction made it all the better. In just one episode, I feel that Uka's shy nature meshes better with Kinme's friendly, outgoing nature than with Ryusho's, who oftentimes feels like he's just... there. Just like he is here.

Rating:

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Wash It All Away is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.