What happens when you replace the main character of Maria Holic with a stuffed bear? Well, this episode sets out to answer that enigmatic question by completely taking her out of the episode. Unfortunately, it doesn’t totally back up its promise to give us Matsurika Holic, something which I’d been looking forward to since the series’ beginning, but it mostly succeeds.
Before I get to the actual review though, I’m going to tell a little story leading up to my viewing of the episode in an attempt to lead to a more fluid transition to the actual episode.
This morning, I woke up to a sharp pain in my head and a dark night looming outside my window. I tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but my pillow felt uncomfortably warm. I flipped it over and set my head back down before closing my eyes, and the sharp pain only got worse as soon as my eyelids closed.
I left my computer on that night to play some soothing music to help me sleep, so I groggily leaned over my bed to turn on my monitor to see that it was 3 am. The artificial light tore apart my corneas as I attempted to adjust my eyes.
So why that long winded introduction? Well, I was left with few things to do: Either write, watch Zero Punctuation until I fell asleep again, or get a head start on my Monday anime. I watched Zero Punctuation for about an hour, and my headache waned enough for me to focus on whatever anime I decided to start.
To be blunt, Maria Holic Alive is one of my guilty pleasure series. With greater focus on Matsurika and Mariya this time around, it’s proven itself to have a better idea of what makes the humor work. That, coupled with the always hilarious opening and closing songs, has made Maria Holic Alive one of my most anticipated shows of the season. The humor is very hit and miss, but it does hit with good consistency this time around by not focusing on Kanako’s paper thin entourage of cardboard cutouts.
The entire episode can be summed up with the questions “Where’s Kanako? Is she dead? Why should we care? What the fuck happened to the promised Matsurika Holic?” asked in quick succession. While the previous episode focused on the activities immediately before and after Kanako’s “vacation” in a separate pocket dimension to study for the finals that she had miserably failed, this one focuses on the activities of the outside world during her imprisonment.
Perplexingly, the first half of the episode has to do with Mariya trying to market a history based card game to various demographics… which dutifully explains the seeming card game obsession in the dorms at the time if Kanako’s release. The exchanges aren’t the most humorous, but compared to the second half they’re amusing enough.
It isn’t until Touichirou shows up that the episode goes downhill, however. I never liked the priest and his moral dilemmas. As a side character that torments Kanako inadvertently on a regular basis per Mariya’s prodding, he’s great. But when episodes are centered on him, they generally tend to lag behind in quality in comparison with othersTouichirou wonders why Kanako’s been inexplicably absent, having the idea that she died based on questioning Mariya, who answers his questions in an unusually vague fashion that could easily imply death.
Sadly, this is about as funny as the second half gets, until Kanako shows up again to inevitably end up watching the entirety of a 112 episode series in one sitting… without blinking. Old Legend of the Galactic Heroes reference, but it’s pretty sharp.
Touichirou’s inner monologues and investigations just aren’t worth making episodes centered around, as could be gleaned from the second to last episode of the first season.
I’d say that this was a generally successful episode, minus the cheated, albeit acknowledged as such, promise of Matsurika Alive. It’s hard to tell where the series will go from here, but as a comedy it really doesn’t need much analysis. In conclusion, it needs more Mariya and Matsurika, less Touichirou and pointless speculation.
Yet, I still give this episode and the series as a whole a tentative recommendation. This episode did well at working out some loose ends present in the previous one. The humor doesn’t stay strong throughout, but that’s the story of Maria Holic. Nothing about it is spectacular, but you could do far worse. Basically, if you enjoyed the rest of Alive, this episode is more of the same, as perplexing as it is entertaining.
What do you think of Shizu? I really liked how we saw her boy mode in this episode for the very first time.
Shizu didn’t make much of an impression on me, honestly. Then again, she doesn’t hold a torch to her brother as far as zany cross-dressing antics go.
If there’s more of her, that’s a good sign. If not, this episode didn’t make me thrilled at her reappearance.
LOL, so true.
Again, I didn’t feel strongly one way or the other about her appearance. Here’s hoping she has a bigger part in later episodes though~