Sometimes creators come back to an idea after some time has passed. Whether the world has seen the “old version” or not and however the two stack up to each other in terms of quality, it’s pretty inevitable. After all, most creators tend to create things they would like, and if what you like doesn’t change a whole lot, it’s inevitable that you’d return to certain concepts.
I mention this because Waiting in the Summer is the spiritual successor with a very similar pitch and from the same creator to a property called Onegai☆Teacher. If that sounds somewhat familiar to long-time readers it’s probably because I reviewed the semi-sequel to it, Onegai☆Twins some time ago. While Twins had its own independent story, it did of course have some inheritance from Teacher, so while I haven’t to date taken the time to view Onegai☆Teacher, I am at least somewhat aware of its facts: Alien comes to earth, bumps into boy, and through some more-or-less contrived coincidences ends up both his teacher and his fiancee.
Twins largely dropped the space alien angle, other than with its mascot critter’s presence, while keeping the same setting. Waiting in the Summer, meanwhile, is a new property with a new setting and no in-lore connection to the Onegai series. However, it features a very similar pitch: Alien comes to earth, bumps into boy, is a cute girl who’s really bad at disguising the fact she’s a space alien, romantic comedy ensues.
Viewing this, as is necessary for me, as its own thing and not in light of Onegai☆Teacher, how does Waiting in the Summer do?
Well, let’s start by introducing our characters. Our lead is Kaito Kirishima, a gloomy bespectacled boy who is a bit of a dreamer and the avid cameraman of his circle of friends, who want to make a movie. I guess they’re kind of the film club, but that’s not made explicit. He’s also an orphan, with his big sister being head of house, and she’s leaving on a three-month business trip. Lucky timing. He’s out late one night working on filming when he gets blindsided by a UFO and, in a way he can’t quite recall, saved from certain death as a mysterious hand reaches out for him.
The next day, we meet his friends. There’s Kanna Tanigawa, who is this show’s Ichigo – short blue-black hair, slim build, something of a temper, massive crush that pretty much all the mutual friends seem to support, you get the idea. We also have Mio Kitahara, this show’s Mikuru Asahina. She’s not a time agent, but she is the notably more feminine of the starter girls with a very meek and shy personality and way of squeaking timidly. Rounding the group out is Tetsuro Ishigaki, the Casanova-in-training who right off the bat is introduced as someone the girls in school and possibly even the female teachers are crazy for.
That brings us to our alien. Ichika Takatsuki presents as a bombshell redhead who Kaito seems oddly drawn to, even beyond what would be her natural magnetism. She’s transferring in right before summer, and thanks to Tetsuro deciding to actually talk to her, she signs on with the film crew to be in their summer movie. It turns out her spaceship crashed and presently doesn’t seem able to be fixed, too. With her comes Remon Yamano, their senpai, who attached herself to Ichika quick and otherwise has a kind of mischievous yet lackadaisical vibe.
After school, Kaito runs into Ichika again and accidentally (saying his fantasy lines out loud) invites her to stay over. She likes this idea because she otherwise doesn’t have a place, and it’s probably a good thing too, since while she’s getting situated, Kaito passes out, dark marks spreading across his neck from the evidently poorly repaired UFO damage. In the process of fixing him up she gets discovered by big sis and Kanna, but of course since she’s not quite as obvious as certain catgirls, they don’t quite catch on about the alien bit right away.
She’s close to as obvious, though – Remon gets everybody drunk for what seems to be her own amusement, both seemingly trying to get Ichika and Kaito to hook up and just for trolling purposes, but that means when Ichika’s cute mascot critter, Rinon, appears, they write it off and after that have a sort of weirdness censor for it because it was already introduced. Kaito’s health lapsing and being repaired by Ichika via kiss on the forehead also leads to a bit of misunderstanding where he thinks he confessed to her and was shot down while she thinks he might have realized her alien nature. The former is forced out in not all that much screen time.
This comes as we start to understand the tail-chasing love polygon that is this cast. Kaito has quickly fallen for Ichika, though the weird bond of their meeting and his healing might have something to do with it. Kanna transparently likes Kaito, but that’s not all of it: Tetsuro seems to be carrying a torch for Kanna despite outwardly supporting her pursuit of Kaito. Mio seems aware of this even as Tetsuro tries to deny it, and speaks from the heart when she says that must hurt, because she’s poorly concealing feelings for him as well. Strap yourselves in, it’s that kind of show.
As such, we spend some time with the kids as pretty much just that. The movie, as scripted by Rinon, is suspiciously similar to the actual events (Ichika playing an alien who ends up boarding with Kaito’s character), and future Kaito’s narration seems a little ominous, but that’s that. However, someone can’t leave well enough alone as Tetsuro decides to spill the beans about Kanna’s feelings directly to Kaito, which Ichika happens to overhear.
This isn’t resolved before the team takes a trip to Okinawa, courtesy of Tetsuro’s big sister. There, they encounter a childhood friend of Kaito’s, who seemingly has deep and unresolved feelings for him, along with her psycho friend who falls for Tetsuro to the point of pretty much trying to force herself on him. Ichika walks in on the moment of one confession, while Mio saves Tetsuro at the cost of very much exposing herself.
The hijinx continue, leading to a couple critical scenes. In one, Kaito’s childhood friend decides to be the bigger woman. She says she wasn’t really as interested as she let on and was on the rebound from a bad breakup, but how much or little she’s lying, she sets up Kaito and Ichika properly. On the side with Tetsuro, Mio keeps saving him as he’s pursued, leading to a confrontation with the psycho. She calls Mio out and we find out she has an embarrassing secret: her family is a bunch of nudists, and while she’s deeply ashamed of it, she has lapses such as forgetting proper underwear. Tetsuro tells her that if she has issues she should talk honestly to her friends and that they’ll support her, which leads to her confessing her feelings for him. Meanwhile, Remon gets Kanna drunk again and photographs her in stupid costumes, while some of the struggling with the psycho girl got Rinon squished. Rinon is fine, but it’s strongly implied this triggered something with bad implications.
This comes to a head a the summer festival, when Remon arranges a test of courage to troll everybody. Her abandoning of Ichika is interrupted as Ichika learns her distress signal is on and can’t be stopped, and an unmanned pod has been sent to retrieve her. Kaito runs to rescue her from he doesn’t know what, and while the pod is defeated between Rinon and Kaito, Kaito is beat the hell up again and the masquerade is well and truly broken.
The jig being up, Ichika comes clean. The gang takes it pretty well and in stride. Thus, this mostly leads to emotional resolves, reaching the climax as Kanna gives a hell of a speech to Ichika (who had started to avoid Kaito for fear of hurting him again, when he she had to leave if nothing else) and Ichika and Kaito’s ship sailing as they admit their mutual feelings and kiss.
Props to Kanna, this show has pretty much spent its run time smashing her heart into little pieces and she still manages to be the bigger woman. Not that it doesn’t leave her in tears. On the Kanna-Tetsuro-Mio line, Mio seems to see herself in Kanna’s shoes (the guy she likes, likes someone else) but Tetsuro seems more conflicted: he still clearly cares a lot about Kanna, but Mio has made an impression, and more as she’s found her spine since confessing to him.
Eventually, Mio convinces Tetsuro to be honest with himself and he gives a half-confession to Kanna. This gives her the strength to look up and tell Kaito straight, including that she accepts that she’s not winning. Mio seems ready to pick up the pieces of Tetsuro, but then he did already seem to be wavering her direction. Thus, everyone can get back to mostly being friends and making a movie.
This is when Ichika’s big sister arrives. She wants to take Ichika back before there’s a huge legal issue thanks to that distress call and destroyed recovery pod, and there’s a lot of potential problems if she doesn’t because this universe’s aliens follow the Star Trek Prime Directive – they’re not supposed to make contact with Pre-FTL species at all, much less live among them or even (as Ichika suggests) take one of them to space.
However, Remon brokers a possible solution (due to being some kind of forever-young MIB agent): if they can find the mysterious spot Ichika was looking for in the first place, it would prove Aliens had already messed with Earth, and thus that it would no longer be subject to restrictions for undeveloped planets.
They find the spot by cross-referencing earthling maps, looking for somewhere in Japan that was hidden from alien scanning, but they make it only as the search party arrives and deploys an anti-teleport field over the planet, meaning they need to get there and get proof on foot (or by car – thanks, Remon) before the space cops locate them.
Most of the gang uses some gadgets from Ichika’s big sister to play diversion, during which Tetsuro gets his act together and asks Mio out on a date. The “rescue” pods keep coming though, and even crash the van before Remon peels off and reveals she basically has a Transformer on call here. As the episode goes on we intersperse tender scenes of our main couple with more and more literal Men In Black coming out of the woodwork to help defeat the alien pods chasing them.
They find the spot, but any easy evidence has been lost to time, and with their arrival, the pods can find it too. Thus, with one last “I love you” scene between the two, they take Ichika away.
In the epilogue, we see that Tetsuro and Mio are going slow and shaky, as makes sense given that Tetsuro hadn’t gotten over Kanna yet. Kaito’s big sis comes home, with souvenirs for him and the missing Ichika. Remon leaves school, presumably because she can’t have that cover in one place forever, but she gives the others the unfinished film, declaring that the last scene can’t be made until Ichika returns.
In the ending montage we see some of the scenes that were filmed, and also MIB HQ, where some of the things Ichika left behind were, since Rinon and the crashed ship were never cleaned up, meaning the MIB (Japan branch, but their base is clearly an homage to the US branch in the film Men In Black, down to all the furnishings being the same) has them to reverse-engineer.
In the last scene, we see the school festival sometime after everyone graduated, where the film club is screening their movie… including a final scene of Ichika, wearing the clothes Kaito’s sister bought for her, implying that she was able to come back in fairly short order and all will be happy for the once literally star-crossed lovers. The end!
So, while I haven’t seen Onegai☆Teacher, I have of course seen Onegai☆Twins. A lot of the stuff here is what I’d expect out of the same writers years later, especially years of improvement later. The web of adolescent love is intelligently put together. Though there is a slight rub in that none of the potential ships get explicit on-screen happy ends, it feels like life for flawed teenagers here more than melodrama. The characters have their own notes, their own feelings, and their ways of reacting to the world. They’re not all great people, but they’re pretty well written. Everyone in this show as more than a bit part is extremely rounded, with the possible exception of Remon, whose deal can’t be revealed until the final episodes. That in and of itself knocks the whole romantic tangle out of the park.
And speaking of Remon, those last couple of episodes kind of make this, in a humorous way, a better sequel to Men in Black than the actual second movie. Which isn’t saying much, but still, it was actually a fairly delightful homage, especially when Ichika’s inner daydreams revealed that she was terrified of fictional MIBs to start out with. A brick joke as well executed as the MIB line here is a rare thing.
The voice actors also give it their all. I don’t normally comment too much on that, since I know even though I watch and review subs a lot of folks prefer the dubs and it won’t be relevant to them, but there are a lot of screaming or crying scenes in this show that would be so easy to get overly shrill on. It’s one of the few times where I can say I was reminded of AnoHana in a good way.
And compared to Twins, which very much showed its age in the technical aspects, Waiting in the Summer looks great to modern eyes. The characters are well designed with distinct looks and visual personalities. Some Ichika and Mio are probably a bit in the “moe” category, but there’s still a down-to-earth detail to this show. It’s clearly a period piece, seeing as everybody has rotary dial phones and film cameras, but the art sells a very timeless feel to it. Action is rare, but when we’ve got to show space stuff, it shows us space stuff that looks very good, at least for the typical ovoid white-with-lights designs you see in a lot of scifi shows.
All in all, Waiting in the Summer was a fine little watch. It was a little watch, running about as long as it could to fill up twelve episodes. It was a little watch, not caring to do too much more than deal with the fractured hearts and complicated situations of a group of teenage friends. But it was a fine one as well within those brackets. Aside from Onegai works, I think the most comparable show I’ve reviewed would be Orange: A group of friends in highschool meet a new member of their gang who has complex circumstances and whose chemistry with the lead shakes up the already tangled love polygon of the group, with a sprinkle of scifi-fantasy material on top. It is kind of similar when put that way. Kiznaiver can also come to mind, but that had its own issues.
To that end, I’ll give Waiting in the Summer a B+. It’s better than Twins and has fewer faults (if shockingly less scope) than Orange, meaning it earns a higher grade. Check it out the next time you’re in the mood for a little romantic fluff.