You are Ms. Servant

Episode 8

Of all the vehicles to lead us to a more detailed version of Yuki's past, I certainly wasn't expecting it to be saucelessness—yet against all odds, that's precisely what happened. On paper, I really like the idea of an episode that revolves around Yuki, who so loves sauce, being unable to have sauce for a while because the store is out. And in practice, I think it works for the first few minutes of the episode. But using this as a segue to her having nightmares where an empty bottle of sauce proceeds to recap her traumatic childhood? That part I'm less sure about. The phrase “tonal whiplash” springs to mind.

It's really hard to take the exposition dump about Yuki's childhood seriously when it's being delivered by a giant, cartoonish-looking empty sauce bottle. And what irks me is that the episode didn't need to tell us about Yuki's past in this jarring way. I think it's safe to say that Yuki's been through so much that nobody would question her just having nightmares without any particular rhyme or reason. The show doesn't need to create an excuse for her, let alone one whose tone clashes so hard. But since this no-sauce plot more or less dissolves afterward, that's exactly what it comes off as: an excuse which both literally and figuratively doesn't have the sauce.

I say that this storyline “more or less” dissolves because we're soon told that the school is having a festival, and the class that gets the overall highest rank in the festival is rewarded with some premium sauce. This is, needless to say, an irresistible prospect to a sauce-deprived Yuki. But I don't think Yuki's unquenchable thirst for sauce was necessary to this plot; surely, she'd want the premium sauce regardless of whether or not she was in a sauceless state. So the whole not-having-sauce plotline ends up feeling totally superfluous.

And speaking of the school, it turns out that Yuki has poor grades. On one hand, this kind of thing happens—a person can be smart without being good at school (and vice-versa for that matter). But on the other, it was in this very episode that we learned that the entire thing that led to Yuki's becoming an assassin was her being a brilliant child prodigy. So I have mixed feelings about how believable it is that she's not good at school; her observational skills and photographic memory, which she had developed enough to be able to speak fifteen different languages, were specifically called out—those would give her a huge academic advantage. But at the same time, in the midst of Yuki's bloodsoaked upbringing, I doubt she was learning about, say, the French Revolution, or how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. So we'll just call it a wash; Yuki's bad at school, and that's not necessarily implausible.

Finally, this week's episode further affirmed the thoughts I've been having the past few weeks about this anime trying to accomplish too much in too little time. We're very clearly about to learn more about not-Senri-Chaos;Child, who may or may not be Yuki's younger sister. She is, at the very least, someone who admires her deeply—which makes me think, based on what we learned this episode about the strained relationship between Yuki and her younger sister, that maybe she's not Yuki's younger sister after all (she's probably just another assassin, in that case). Like we've seen in previous episodes, this anime loves introducing new elements into its story, but it never really does anything with them. So if this anime stays true to form, then she'll stop being relevant after next week—doomed to be replaced with yet another side character or story element with a maximum shelf life of two episodes.

So this is all to say that in many ways, this fell really flat. Don't get me wrong; I'm more interested than ever in the details of Yuki's backstory, and I'm glad the series is finally shedding more light on the matter. But at the same time, this anime seems to be having a hard time deciding what it wants to do, and what kind of an anime it wants to be. Lately it feels more and more like it's just throwing everything at the wall, but not waiting around to see if anything sticks.Remember when this was an anime about Yuki wanting to be a maid? And at this point, with only a handful of episodes left to go, I'm not feeling terribly optimistic that it'll get back on track any time soon.

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You are Ms. Servant is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.