Grand Blue Dreaming - Episode 8 [Review]

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Grand Blue Dreaming - Episode 8 [Review]

The first of this week's two segments is yet another one of those sketches that seems content to land mostly within the “pleasantly watchable” range of the comedy spectrum, spending the majority of its ten minutes with the Peek-A-Boo gang just hanging out at the bar where Kotobuki works in his free time. There are a couple of chuckle-worthy jokes that involve Iori and Kohei getting raunchy ideas about the kind of part-time gig Kotobuki must have, but not much else is laugh-out-loud funny. The guys need to earn some cash for their upcoming trip to Okinawa, so the friendly bar owner lets them hang out and even practice their own bartending skills, while the girls get to be amused at how bad Iori and Kohei are at mixing drinks that consist of more than just vodka and whiskey.

It's mostly just nice hangout time with the crew, though it does consist of one exceptionally funny joke. Iori and Kohei have no idea what to make of even the most common cocktails, so when they see Azusa order a simple gin lime, they assume that all recipes can be sorted out based on their names. This of course leads to shenanigans when Aina orders a Screwdriver and instead of receiving vodka and orange juice, she gets a glass filled with vodka and a literal screwdriver. The real clincher comes when the boys recognize their mistake and fix it by replacing the Philips-Head screwdriver with a flat-bladed one, once again proving that repetition combined with proper comedic timing can make for a great one-two joke combo. The same can't be said for the way the sketch ends, with the bar owner mistaking Iori for gay and immediately assuming he's some kind of predator, just another of the dozens of crappy gay panic bits that Grand Blue Dreaming falls back on when it runs out of ideas.

The second story of the week is another one of those dreaded stories that involve Iori and Kohei's college buddies getting all weird about their inability to get laid, so you can imagine how surprised I was to find this week's variation on the premise to actually be funny. The show has always leaned into the boys' pathetic natures with these segments, but until now it never quite went far enough to justify the ugliness of the joke. The stories were too basic and familiar to successfully sell their crassness as funny.

But this week, things finally cross over into being so silly and stupid that the crudeness at last comes full circle back around to being amusing. We've seen how irrationally violent Shinichiro and crew get at the thought of Iori even cohabitating with an attractive woman, but things get really weird when they all discover that one of their comrades in perpetual virginity, Yu, has stopped hanging out with them because he's been having Actual Real Sex With a Human Woman™. Naturally, their first instinct is to interrupt the couple mid-coitus with a bunch of manipulative pranks.

I won't lie, I was just impressed to watch an anime where two adults were depicted having a regular sex life, and I'm willing to admit I found it pretty funny to see that healthy pairing utterly destroyed in mere minutes. It's one thing to shove Shinchiro's hundreds of porn DVDs through Yu's mail slot, or for Iori to send fake messages to his phone that almost get Yu completely choked out by his bedroom buddy, Rie. But the best bit of the whole vignette was how quickly Kohei's disinterest in the pranks turned into soul-consuming rage when he discovers that Rie is a childhood friend who just so happens to affectionately refer to Yu as her “onii-chan" in bed. This causes Kohei to bust out his secret talent, which is an uncanny ability to replicate the voices of the anime girls he obsesses over, which finally pushes Rie to her breaking point.

One of the reasons this sequence worked for me where similar ones from before failed is the gang's stone-faced commitment to completely ruining what seemed to be a perfectly good relationship. The episode's final moments see the men weepy and cheering when Yu gets kicked to the curb by his understandably furious ex-girlfriend, since it only takes him about fifteen seconds of being single to ask after Rie's friends. Iori and the others embrace Yu as a true blue loser just like them, and I'm much more willing to embrace more terrible members of Grand Blue Dreaming's cast when the joke is entirely on the absurd and sad antics these dummies get up to, and not so much on the poor souls who have to suffer on the receiving end of their nonsense.

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Grand Blue Dreaming - Episode 6 [Review]

 

Grand Blue Dreaming - Episode 6 [Review]

Even just six episodes into its twelve-week run, Grand Blue Dreaming has fallen into the familiar groove that most silly hangout comedies will eventually hit, whether they last for a dozen episodes or a dozen seasons. The cast and their dynamics have more or less fallen into place, and the series' trademark histrionic banter and grotesque facial expressions has become relatively predictable and familiar. Depending on your perspective, this can be either a good or bad thing. Familiarity can prove fatal for comedy that isn't able to compensate with strong character writing or interesting stories, but there's also something to be said for getting to spend time with characters you like for a half-hour of shenanigans each week. In situations like that, knowing what to expect can be a part of the charm, like watching reruns of a classic sitcom that you've grown up loving.

Grand Blue Dreaming is a bit too janky and new to mine that kind of comfortable nostalgia, but this episode does just barely fall on the right side of the line that divides comfort and staleness. It lacks the mean-spirited tone that dragged down so much of last week's outing, and it doesn't waste time or energy setting up a high-concept plot to hang its jokes around. We open with a mildly funny cold sketch that show's Iori and his classmates trying (and failing) to cheat their way through a difficult German test, and then the rest of the episode is spent with the Peek a Boo Club cracking open a few cold ones and celebrating Aina's official induction into their band of would-be divers and exhibitionists.

What makes this episode more enjoyable than last week's is that its central joke can gently make fun of its characters without just turning them into assholes. As Aina and Chisa talk shop about what it takes to be a diver, most of the gags this week revolve around how the guys have thus far failed to engage in any kind of diving whatsoever. As Aina continually points out, Iori and crew are much more likely to get wasted and play Naked Rock Paper Scissors, or Naked Pocky Game, or Naked Karaoke. It's absurd, and most everyone involved is definitely acting too immature and ridiculous for their own good, but this version of Grand Blue Dreaming doesn't have to play up the cast's worst traits to be entertaining. Azusa's insistence on getting Iori and Kohei to make out is funny because she genuinely thinks Iori is into both men and women, and thankfully the eventual punchline of their Pocky Game contest isn't a lazy gay panic bit; instead we laugh at Iori and Kohei falling victim to a comically oversized Pocky stick before everyone gets naked and drinks some more.

At this point, Grand Blue Dreaming remembers that it is technically a show about a diving club, with Tokita and Kotobuki reminding Iori and Kohei that they do actually need to demonstrate some basic knowledge of diving signs and procedures. The boys' comical inability to remember even the most basic signs is an alright bit, but the funniest joke of the episode comes when a deceptively sweet Nanaka confronts Iori about his rumored romance with Chisa, and Iori has to frantically put his new knowledge of emergency signals to the test to escape her jealous wrath. I still find the incestuous dynamics of both Nanaka and Iori's feelings for Chisa to be a little strange, but I can roll with it when the show isn't taking Nanaka's forbidden love for her younger sister too seriously.

Unfortunately, the sequence that doesn't work well for this week's episode is the ending, where we finally see the club go diving in the ocean for the first time. Outside of Iori making a dumb comment about Chisa's butt at the very end of the scene, this whole scenario is played completely straight, with Iori taking in the beauty of the ocean and Chisa genuinely appreciating his newfound love for her lifelong passion. The problem is that the show is just too poorly animated to communicate any of these emotions particularly well. As a whole, the show has the depth of a kiddie pool that's started to deflate from being out in the sun for too long, so I find it hard to buy into its more serious storytelling. I don't think we need to explore the burgeoning love affair shared by a hard-partying college freshman and his attractive but aloof cousin – I think Grand Blue Dreaming can get by just fine with slapstick and broad sitcom banter.

Frankly, Grand Blue Dreaming's own worst enemy is its commitment to formula; even the club's newest member only needs a few minutes to recognize that almost every single thing the club does invariably ends with people getting naked and yelling a lot. Grand Blue Dreaming lacks Nichijou's top-notch aesthetics, Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun's affable sweetness, or Asobi Asobase's demented commitment to its characters' absurd misadventures; it's a simpler and less ambitious comedy than its top-shelf peers. As a result, some episodes will be fairly entertaining, while others will end up more irritating than anything else. Like most of its predecessors, “First Buddy” is a perfectly fine way to kill some time, nothing more and nothing less. At this point, that's the bar I'm hoping every episode of Grand Blue Dreaming can clear.

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