Some day I’m going to stop using that
Gladiator reference, but that day is not today. Not when it so
accurately expresses the nature of unpretentious mediocrity like
Quintessential Quintuplets. This is a show that most certainly isn’t
high art… but it’s not trying to be high art, it’s trying to be
somewhat entertaining, to make half an hour of your time a little
better. As such, it seems kind of silly to hold the show accountable
for not being something it never tried to be. In cases like this,
the end product will, admittedly, never make an A-rank grade… but
it can still be judged between the lower brackets based on how well
it accomplishes what little ambition it has. And since its February,
a month the West dedicates to romance thanks to Geoffrey Chaucer
writing a few lines about birds, we’re going to take a look at this
one.
An example of what I’m talking about is
that the show actually starts with the wedding. In any teen romance,
you kind of expect that if all goes well, the crushes of the present
will eventually evolve into marriages in the future, but most shows
will leave that as an implication, or possibly an epilogue scene at
the end of the last episode. Now, I think half the reason that
Quintessential Quintuplets goes with the wedding motif is because
they can get away with doing anything but naming names and, because
the quintuplets are canonically identical in appearance or close
enough (something seen more in photographs, flashbacks, and the like
rather than their fairly unique character designs that let the viewer
name them at a glance) that it doesn’t actually disambiguate between
the five leads to see the Bride. The other half, though, is a
statement. “We’re not going to pretend this isn’t what you want to
see. You don’t have to suspend your disbelief when there’s a threat
to the continuation of the story, we know you know well enough that
he’ll get with one of the girls in the end.”
And in some ways this is a really bad
idea. It does reduce the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief.
True, you know the show isn’t going to end in the first half when our
MC is set a task to remain the girls’ tutor and fails, just because,
you know, there are more episodes and all that jazz. But you might
have felt the threat a little more strongly if the evidence against
was not within the show itself, in the first scene and the openings.
In other ways, I do think the best word to describe the move is
unpretentious. Because you do, in fact, know what’s going on and it
doesn’t feel the need to hide.
So, more specifics. It’s fairly odd
doing this as a “spoiler” review because there’s not really all
that much plot to spoil. Our main character for the show is
Fuutarou, a broke high school genius who, after a kind of vitriolic
time in the lunch room with a weird girl, lands a tutoring job that
pays five times the standard rate! The problems arrive in rapid
succession after that. First of all, the girl he offended earlier is
his pupil. Second, it’s not just her, she has four
identical-except-to-the-camera siblings. Third, they are all
completely awful at their studies, not just garden variety slow.
That last part is actually a nagging
little problem I have with the show. It’s really hard to believe
that all five of the siblings are as bad as they supposedly are.
Yotsuba (the fun-loving one) and Ichika (who has work taking up a lot
of her time) maybe, but Nino (guided by hatred) and Itsuki (tsundere
classic) are shown to at least try and Miku (the nerdy one), while
overspecialized, has a head for trivia. It would be fine if they
were just kind of behind, but the show needs them to be downright
terrible. On one early test, they score 100%… combined.
And then I remember I’m watching
Quintessential Quintuplets. The show looks at my complaint and dryly
asks: “But you want to see the cute girls, right?”. And I
reluctantly admit that I do and shut up about minor little fridge
logic quibbles. It’s like trying to nitpick the frame story in
Mystery Science Theater 3000, there’s just no point.
In any case, most of the rest of the
show is just Fuutarou trying to get these five idiots to study
effectively. It’s easier said than done because each of them comes
with a massive supply of baggage and issues that need to be resolved
away from the flash cards. Those issues are the meat of the story,
since they result in having arcs getting to know each of the girls.
Or rather, most of the girls. As of
this writing, season 2 of Quintessential Quintuplets is on the way.
Season 1, however, doesn’t make time for all of the Quintuplets. It
mostly belongs to Miku and Ichika, with a side order of Itsuki. Nino
and Yotsuba don’t get zero character development, but Nino is clearly
being left off for future reveals and Yotsuba… well I doubt that in
the “final product” she’d be the literally only one to not get
dimensions, but right now she is left fairly flat.
The character development is what the
show lives or dies on. You’re either going to like what you see in
the girls and how they interact with Fuutarou, and consequently the
show, or it’s going to fall flat and so will the show. For myself, I
think it was OK. Quintessential Quintuplets isn’t a great character
study. It doesn’t belong alongside great pieces that take you into
the depths of a rounded character. It is not the kind of show that
makes you feel like you know the characters as real people. But…
it is a fair bit better than I feel like it had any right to be. The
show is largely unpretentious (I keep using that word. Hopefully it
means what I think it means) when it’s good and lazy when it’s bad,
but the development given to Miku and Ichika goes a step beyond and
could actually be called good. They’re just two out of the five, but
they’re worth your time.
There are what I feel to be two big
movements that bear talking about on their own. The first is the
opening act, from the beginning of the show until the point where the
girls’ father (only ever ‘seen’ on the other end of a telephone) says
that their results on the next test will determine whether Fuutarou
stays employed, and we get those results back.
At the start, Fuutarou’s reputation
with the girls is awful. Yotsuba, the most natural fool of the lot,
is the only one who seems to actually want him there in the least.
With Itsuki, it’s his own fault, but Ichika is busy, Miku is
extremely withdrawn, and Nino…
Nino is one of the problems with this
show that’s actually worth mentioning. She is just way too
mean-spirited. In Fuutarou’s first meeting to tutor the girls, Nino
goes so far as to drug him in order to knock him out and send him
packing. Now, I’m not a chemist or an anesthesiologist but I’m
pretty sure that most things that could knock somebody out like that
are decidedly not safe, having a narrow window for “Sleeping
potion” before it hits “deadly poison”, and allowances must be
made for the target’s size or metabolism. And then you remember that
Nino canonically couldn’t pass a chemistry or physiology class to
save her own life. This is neither funny nor charming, it’s
downright psychotic. It’s not dwelled on or treated as that heavy,
so you can largely let it pass, but it’s hardly Nino’s only extremely
harsh move.
Because Nino is overall shrill, and
legitimately hostile, usually essentially unprovoked. True, we ‘get’
that she resents outside intrusion into her family setting, but that
far from excuses her behavior. Fuutarou wins some appreciation from
Miku and Ichika (and had Yotsuba’s support from the start) and even
reaches a sort of armed neutrality with Itsuki, but Nino… at the
midterm, when the quintuplets’ father sets the girls passing as
Fuutarou’s test, Nino is the one to find out, and when the father
calls back after the girls (though doing better than ever) still
predictably fail, she does call him out and lie to cover for
Fuutarou. It’s supposed to be her redemption to an extent, but it
reads that she’s just more resentful of her father at the moment than
she is of Fuutarou, not that there’s been any actual cessation of
hostilities. She’s just as shrill as ever, even as her reason
erodes, and that makes her not very fun to watch. It’s funny,
because I know people who follow the manga and love Nino, but she’s
got a pretty Herculean redemption ahead of her.
The second major arc to talk about is
the camping trip arc that covers the last four episodes. Fuutarou
and the girls are part of a school trip up to the mountains to ski
and such, and it provides a change of scenery and stakes for the end
of the show. They’re not really going to be pushed to study on a
trip, and they’re in a constrained and unfamiliar setting. Probably
the best episode of the show is here, when Ichika and Fuutarou get
locked in a storage shed and we actually get a little deeper
exploration of their characters.
All the same… I know the tutor thing
is just a means to an ends, but it seems like it would be important
to Fuutarou. I don’t know how the Manga is structured, what was
skipped and what was ahead, but if there was more material I’d almost
have preferred this to end with the midterm, because it’s both a
critical moment for the relationship with the girls and Fuutarou’s
role in their lives. The camp trip is only critical for the
relationships, he’s basically just acting as their babysitter as they
get into trouble out there.
Maybe it was the choice of final scene
(well, final scene in the “present”. We go back to the future
wedding at the very end) influenced the choice to end where it ends,
because it’s actually sweet and heartfelt: Fuutarou is sick during
the bonfire dance, and it’s at least partially the fault of the
girls, so they all stay in with him and hold his hand through the end
of it. The show lets this be a quiet, genuine, low-key moment
despite building up the bonfire dance and holding hands at the end in
a big way.
It’s things like that final scene
keeping Quintessential Quintuplets out of the trash heap. The girls
are cute, but cute drawings are cheap; if a show is going to be worth
coming back to those cute drawings need to be attached to at least
watchable personalities and entertaining events.
On that score, Quintessential
Quintuplets manages. It doesn’t pass with flying colors, and I’m not
sure why this of all shows is getting a second season, but I guess I
liked it well enough and certainly wouldn’t mind watching more, since
it showed once or twice that it could be better than the mediocre
showing it gives in general. As such, I think C+ is the fitting
grade for the show. I wouldn’t recommend against it, but unless you
just want to chill out with a very laid-back sort of harem show, I
think you can do better, too.