Wave, Listen to Me!

Episode 10

So, just what was the broadcasting scheme that Kanetsugu and Minare were cooking up around the not-so-successful reunion date she had with Mitsuo last week? “I Have To Do This” is all about the planning and execution of this ambitious little plan, which Kanetsugu has framed as both a metaphorical and literal “revival” for his fledgling host. The full eight-hour recording of the entire date is going to be used as the foundation for the latest Wave, Listen to Me! show, and it will give Minare the opportunity to put her old drama and life to bed for good. Naturally, the whole ordeal is also dressed up as a lurid and somewhat kinky paranormal thriller, where Minare and Kanetsugu play a couple that is disposing of Mitsuo's freshly murdered corpse…until that corpse digs its way out of the dirt for revenge.

There's such a lack of structure to this week's episode that I honestly had a hard time figuring out where to start with this review. All of the scenes we get are technically connected, since they all exist in the fallout of Minare's Bad Date and the upcoming Wave show, but there's not so much of a concrete plot this time around, being a much more subdued affair. First, Minare announces to Mizuho that she's moving out, then there's some mild drama between Minare and Makie at Voyager, and finally we get lots of nerdy behind-the-scenes stuff about the production of the radio drama. We don't even get to see the meatiest bits of the show this time, either, since Zombie Mitsuo arrives as the Wave, Listen to Me! equivalent of a cliffhanger.

The Makie vs. Minare scene is maybe the most substantial of the bunch, but it's also the one I feel the iffiest on. Basically, Minare pays Voyager a visit and loudly decides that Nakahara is just too damned self-sufficient and capable for her to really be into him (she likes to take care of helpless doofuses like Mitsuo). Then, she goes on to have an equally loud phone call with the MRS crew that goes over her seemingly romantic date with Mitsuo in fine detail, which drives Nakahara mad; at this, Makie gets surprisingly confrontational and demands that Minare stop toying with Nakahara's emotions. It's a tense and well-done scene, which is only hampered by how uninterested I am in the kinda-sorta love triangle that Wave seems to be setting up between the Voyager trio. Though Minare seems to have flirted with the idea of being attracted to Nakahara, I feel like the show has gone out of its way to make it pretty clear that she isn't that into him, at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, Makie and Nakahara already have the beginnings of a domestic thing going on together, and it's easy to pick up on the romantic undercurrents when Nakahara takes Makie's advice to extend an olive branch to Minare — he asks her to name a new vegetarian curry, because Makie noticed that Minare was put off by all the new contributions to the menu. Basically, I can't decide Wave's approach to Minare struggling to square away her relationships at Voyager with her new life direction is realistically messy, or just contrived.

The radio production stuff was much more successful, if only because it committed to Wave's charming brand of weirdness. I'm not just talking about the broadcast itself, either, since the episode devotes a surprising amount of time to letting a couple of weird old men screw around with their sound effects tools. Kanetsugu insists that these two audio maestros, Kakoton and Kakoen, are industry legends, and it isn't hard to see why. The show gets in a great joke when it goes out of its way to portray the two as old-fashioned analogue kooks, what with their beaded fans and slide whistles and other props, only to reveal the real reason Kanetsugu hired them: They're actually computer wizards too, and they've been able to manipulate Minare's raw audio file of Mitsuo's voice in order to get him to “perform” any lines they want. They're essentially deepfaking a total stranger just to fit Kanetsugu's somewhat deranged plan to have Minare murder, bury, and then probably re-murder her ex-boyfriend on a live radio show at 3:00 in the goddamned morning.

It is interesting that Kanetsugu is leaning hard into the role he's carved out for himself as Minare's mentor, and I'm keen to see how his past with Sissel. He even jumps into the recording booth to record the lines of Murderer Minare's lover/partner-in-crime which is… well, it's definitely a little weird, that's just part-and-parcel with this show, I guess. We're getting close to the season's end, and though I can't tell exactly what kind of conclusion the story is building to, Minare is definitely establishing her own program as something that audiences aren't likely to forget any time soon. Here's to hoping that, by the time the season is all said and done, the show itself follows suit.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• You've Got a Face Made For Radio: There was a surprising shortage of Excellent Minare Reactions this week, but I'll go ahead and give this week's medal to her and Mizuho's very relatable reactions to Kakoton and Kakoen's awful old-man puns.

• That said, Kakoton and Kakoen were freakin' awesome. I especially loved their very long montage of silly faces and noises, and the fact that, for reasons I won't even pretend to fathom, they bear uncanny resemblances to a monkey and a pig , respectively.

• There was a pre-credits scene I couldn't find a place to mention elsewhere, which sees Mizuho asking Kureko out to dinner, only to end up bidding him a wistful goodbye, since he's leaving the station to pursue the Ranzo Arakawa Prize for literature. Komoto was creeping in the background, too, eavesdropping. I don't know what to make of this whole subplot, to tell you the truth. Kureko and Komoto barely exist as characters, and I don't know why we'd be trying to cram in some drama for them and Mizuho so late in the game.

Wave, Listen to Me! is currently streaming on Funimation.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.