new test

Can the series recover from the utter failure that the last episode was?

What They Say:
A former Seigaku tennis player makes a surprise appearance while Ryoma is training, inviting him to witness his match against Tezuka. And before the end of the match, Tezuka’s secret will have been revealed and a life altering decision made.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the way the previous episode pretty much made me want to curse it out, there was a huge temptation to just be done and over with the series considering the direction the show has taken and the kind of strange cruelty to it that just felt rather off putting. There’s always been some level of distaste in the series for certain opponents that come along with how they’re presented, but this series went much further than that when you get down to it. There were cute moments but once the show split into dealing with the two different camps and how rough the mountaintop camp was, it went beyond the level of believability that the show was already long pushing the envelope on.

With this episode, the focus is a bit more split when it comes to the two camps and it actually focuses on real tennis matches. While we’ve had a lot of weird and unusual activities going on at the mountaintop camp, only a portion of it actually focused on tennis between players. They’ve had their unusual training routine going on. At the actual camp where others from Seigaku are like Tezuka, they’ve been going through the process of the elimination matches as expected and it’s proving to be pretty difficult. We’ve seen some amazing skills out of the Seigaku players over the course of the previous series, but here they come across as utterly incapable of really holding their own against the more experienced players. Which works in some cases with some opponents, but also just serves to minimize and trivialize all their past accomplishments.

With a stronger focus on this camp and on Tezuka himself, we see the struggle he undergoes in the present while showcasing some key things from the past as well when he was a younger player making his way up through Seigaku. There’s an interesting bit of potential back story given for him, something that I do wonder if it’s fresh or something that had been touched upon before, but for the most part it doesn’t really add all that much to events. It gives Tezuka the impetus to really do his best here, something that’s always been a part of him, but they try and make it even more personal. It’s not bad when you get down to it, but with the way the characters have been separated and ignore for so long, or at least feeling that way, it doesn’t have any real impact.

In Summary:
The return of actual tennis is a welcome element here and the downgrade of attention on the mountaintop camp as well. With Tezuka going up against someone from his past that he didn’t recognize at first is a decent thing to work with, it’s all dealt with in the time of just this episode so it doesn’t get any expanded depth or impact, especially in comparison to how some matches over the previous series went. The give and take about match length is a difficult thing to work with in a short form series like this but the whole series has bigger problems than that. While this episode does salvage things somewhat by focusing on tennis, it’s lost much of its appeal by what it’s done so far.