(In the voice of Rod Serling) “Picture
of a boy, Kyon by name, starting his first day of High School and
looking forward to an uneventful and unremarkable academic career.
But this young man is about to make a very particular acquaintance:
Haruhi Suzumiya isn’t interested in the mundane goings-on of an
average high school but rather in the strange and fantastical.
Aliens, Espers, and Future Men are her bread and butter. Impossible
things? Perhaps. But as Kyon is about to find out, what Haruhi
wants, Haruhi gets. Kyon’s school life is going to become very
eventful and remarkable indeed, as he’s all set to join a new club
with its meeting room… in the Twilight Zone.”
Ah, yes, The Melancholy of Haruhi
Suzumiya – a colorful comedy with a premise that is, in fact, like
something right out of a classic Twilight Zone episode. Somehow,
it’s simultaneously one of the most unique shows I’ve seen and also
one of the most cliched. That alone is an accomplishment, but
accomplishments don’t always mean something good. Let’s take a look.
The basic premise is about what I’ve
stated in the title and the Twilight Zone narration (my apologies to
anyone unfamiliar with that style) – Haruhi, a teenage girl
obsessed with the bizarre and occult including aliens, psychic
powers, time travelers, and so on, is actually pretty much God. The
extent of her power isn’t totally known but “Destroying this boring
universe and replacing it with a more interesting one” is certainly
within her scope. In fact, depending on who you believe she may have
already done it once before. Part of the catch though is that unlike
you would expect of “God” (or unlike in “It’s a Good Life” –
that’s the last Twilight Zone reference, I promise) Haruhi is totally
unaware of her own capabilities; as far as she knows she’s a normal,
or at least regular mortal human, high school girl. I suppose in
some ways she’s more comparable to Azathoth than anything else,
ignorant of what she’s done or is capable of doing.
Kyon acts as our window onto Haruhi and
the insanity that surrounds her. He’s an exceptionally jaded
classmate of Haruhi’s who first takes note of her changing whims and
bizarre proclivities. One of the few people who talks honestly to
the odd beauty Haruhi, he suggests she found her own school club when
she bemoans having tried all of the existing ones, none of which were
too her liking. Quite naturally, he’s roped in as her first minion
in a club – The SOS Brigade – dedicated to looking for, what
else, Aliens, Espers, Future Men, and the like.
Haruhi promptly recruits Rei-clone Yuki
Nagato (who unbeknownst to Haruhi is actually an alien) and easily
flustered busty redhead Mikuru Asahina (who Haruhi doesn’t know is
from the future). Soon enough they’re joined by mysterious transfer
student Koizumi (who Haruhi doesn’t realize is actually an Esper).
All the insane impossible things that Haruhi wished for are right
there in her club and she simply does not know about it, and the real
mission of the SOS Brigade is for the most part to keep it that way.
These other characters are mostly servicable, but can show surprising depth at times. Koizumi is mostly the “cool and in control” type, and he probably gets the least outside-the-box development. It’s hinted that he might have something of a crush on Haruhi he knows can never come to fruition, but if that’s so he’s a very graceful loser. Mikuru, on the other hand, is more interesting. Her main personality is that “easily flustered” but one must remember that she’s actually an agent from the future sent to maintain the timeline. It’s not that her meek persona is an act, but she has more behind it, including a lot of [classified]. We also see an older version of Mikuru sometimes, who’s even more knowledgeable about what’s coming (having lived through it) and is much more self-assured and playful. Knowing the kind of person Mikuru is going to grow up into helps shed some light on the struggles of her present self, which is interesting even if it’s seldom actually addressed. Lastly, Nagato is our Rei clone. Like most of the lineage she’s soft-spoken, laconic, and unemotive. Considering she’s basically an alien robot, this makes a lot of sense. She doesn’t act like a natural human being because she’s not a natural human being, she’s a human-like avatar of a calculation-happy data entity. However, there are a few times throughout the show where Nagato will show a hint of a human-like interest in things. She’s not the focus of the show, but Kyon does notice when she breaks form to actually have a wish or desire. In some ways, Nagato is very slowly, and in her own way developing a personality that’s more than a soulless machine, and despite it being very subtle this actually makes her a good and interesting character.
Aside from keeping Haruhi in the dark,
they also want to keep her entertained so her frustration doesn’t
manifest as giant monsters in pocket dimensions that Espers have to
fight, and manage the fallout of her occasional whims, since Haruhi
can cause things to appear or change based on her wishes at just
about any time, and most of her wishes are for ‘something
interesting’ that probably isn’t good for the rest of reality.
That’s when things start get weird.
First of all, there’s the matter of
what order you watch “Melancholy” in. There are two seasons of
material (kind of) but they aren’t totally linear. In fact, there
are at least four separate orders that the show can be watched in,
including the season 1 broadcast order, the season 1 dvd order, and
multiple variations of chronological order. The one I’m most
familiar with is the Season 1+2 interwoven chronological order (which
is part of why I’m doing this review in a single go; I don’t actually
have a good sense of where one season ends and the other begins) but
looking over it, if you aren’t going to include Season 2 I can say,
from a storytelling point of view, that the original broadcast order
for Season 1 would have its charm; chronological order places the big
climax as the sixth episode rather than the last! As such when you
watch the show that way the first arc won’t exactly be topped in
terms of drama, and when the show as a whole has to end it just sort
of… stops. But on the other hand you gain a lot of context for
everything that comes after.
The strangest parts of this show are
the meta ones.
I figure the best way to talk about the
show is in the combined chronological order, both because that’s how
I’m most familiar with it and because that keeps arcs together.
The first arc is the self-titled
“Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” that introduces us to Haruhi’s
world, her personality, her power, and all the consequences of it.
Compared to all the other arcs it’s big and bombastic, with a real
feeling of scope. This show is mostly a comedy. Sometimes it
decides to be a laugh-out-loud comedy, the sort that tells jokes, and
other times it’s more of a contented-smile comedy, the sort that just
shows you something that’s mostly fun, but it’s a comedy all the
same. The rest of the show doesn’t largely feel like it has a lot of
weight, no matter what’s technically happening or threatened. The
Melancholy arc has weight to it. Maybe it’s partially because this
is our introduction to the strangeness and we don’t know how far we
can trust it, but I think there’s actually more to it.
Compared to most of the other arcs and
one-offs, the tone of the Melancholy arc is more serious and
mysterious. When Haruhi causes trouble later, we mostly know what’s
going on even if there’s a wrinkle or two along the way. In
Melancholy we the audience don’t quite, and Kyon sure as hell
doesn’t, so it’s a lot more strange and threatening. Even the
cinematography supports this, since you won’t typically see all the
deep shadows and so on in the later arcs but do see them here.
In general, this arc is about Haruhi’s
boredom with the world and nothing else: Her subconscious
frustrations cause pocket dimensions to form, in which giant avatars
smash things for catharsis, and these pocket dimensions (or others)
could supplant the reality we know. Actually, towards the end, they
kind of do – Haruhi tries (again, without really knowing it) to
remake the world, retaining only Kyon, and he has to snap her out of
it while things are still in a state of flux and able to go back.
Kyon will spend the rest of the show
dodging the implications of the fact that he was chosen and that a
kiss from him was Haruhi’s callback to reality… but can you blame
him? Haruhi is brilliant, beautiful (allegedly more so than generic
anime character cuteness), talented, and a certain kind of
charismatic so it’s easy to see what he might, in fact, see in her…
but she’s also self-centered, arrogant, and of course an apocalyptic
danger. She rarely has any actual malice in her deeds, but her
childish antics (and I mean just the mundane ones) sometimes border
on sociopathy. With all her virtues and all her flaws Haruhi really
does come off as an adorable brat. Because of this, even in the
chronological order that puts the climax of Melancholy at spot #6
rather than #14 Final, I don’t feel like Kyon’s aversion to returning
to that particular means of reining in Haruhi is a forced
will-they-or-won’t-they; it’s still forestalling a foregone
conclusion, but it’s entirely natural to do so, and doubly so
considering Haruhi herself indulges in the occasional tsundere-lite
moment of denial.
After the Melancholy arc there’s a
battery of one-off episodes (and a two-part episode), one of which is
worth talking about on its own. In “Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody”
(technically a season 2 episode, though it’s 8th
chronologically) the gang celebrates Tanabata… and thanks to
Mikuru’s time travel, gets involved in the incidents that may be the
genesis of Haruhi’s strange influence when they visit her three years
earlier and Kyon helps her with a first bit of mundane mayhem,
drawing strange symbols on her middle school’s yard. It’s a key
moment in time that, spiritually or literally, the franchise seems
destined to repeat.
Then comes the Endless Eight.
What do I even say about the Endless
Eight?
This arc, eight episodes long, is the
source of a lot of mixed or negative feelings towards the second
season. The basic outlay is simple: Haruhi isn’t satisfied with the
last two weeks of summer vacation, so her subconscious desires and
godlike powers make sure summer never ends. The characters become
entrapped in a time loop, playing out the same two weeks over and
over, with only Yuki Nagato able to remember that they’re looping.
Mikuru’s time travel can’t escape the loop, so they have to resolve
it, but since most of the characters don’t retain anything, finding
what satisfies Haruhi is going to be easier said than done.
And that doesn’t sound too bad. Time
loops have been used to great effect in great shows, so why is the
Endless Eight so infamous? Because each of the eight episodes is a
single iteration of the two-week time loop. That means that the
middle six episodes are practically identical in content, and even
the first and last extremely similar. If you go through the Endless
Eight the whole way, like I did, you will be watching the almost but
not quite entirely same episode eight times in a row. It’s enough to
drive a body mad.
The thing is, and this might actually
serve to increase the dementia-inducing nature of the Endless Eight,
it’s not actually cheap. Each episode has entirely unique animation
(as though the eight nearly identical scripts were handed to eight
different teams – one possibly apocryphal story suggests that’s
exactly what happened) so you know that the studio really did do this
eight times, and there are subtle differences in the script and in
the deliveries of even the lines that remain the same so I’m pretty
sure the voice actors recorded each of the eight episodes as its own
thing, with no copy-past used to create the maddening vortex of
repetition that is the Endless Eight. It’s all new every episode,
it’s just also all the same.
I have some very strong, very mixed
feelings about the Endless Eight. From the perspective of an artist,
I actually think it’s brilliant. I could write a fairly sizable
essay about what the differences between the Endless Eight episodes
tell us about the creative exercise, or get really pretentious
picking out all the minuscule divergences from the ‘core’ script.
It’s a fascinating exploration in both animation and storytelling.
By showing us the Endless Eight this way, the viewer is made a
helpless participant in Haruhi’s time loop – essentially, we’re
forced into Yuki Nagato’s shoes, able to remember that the SOS
brigade has been through this all before yet unable to alter the
outcome and prevent it from repeating again. Mercifully we only have
to wait for #8 and not #15,532. Even then, though, the fact that we
understand the struggle of the character first hand makes it
effective in its own right, and immersive in a way that media – ANY
media – usually struggles to be. You can claim to get ‘sucked
into’ a show or a book fairly often, but when was the last time you
could remember a work of media literally and not just vicariously
causing you to share experiences with its characters?
On the other hand, from the perspective
of a viewer, the Endless Eight is utterly miserable. It’s an
insanity-inducing slog of boredom that consumes over half of the
‘second season’ of Haruhi, gleefully inflicting suffering upon you
for the crime of being a fan. You think I’m joking, you think I’m
overstating it, but I promise you that if you challenge the Endless
Eight you won’t be laughing by the end. I often watch anime with my
wife, and Haruhi was no different. About a third of the way into
episode six she grabbed my arm and simply wailed ‘why?!’ for a bit
before recovering composure. I myself never quite broke from the
stress, but I did feel gradually more demented every time I went back
for another episode, like the Endless Eight was gnawing away at my
mind and weakening my connection with reality the longer it went on.
OK, maybe I’m overstating it a little,
but as a pure consumer of media the Endless Eight goes past ordinary
kinds of bad into realms only reachable by deliberate trolling, which
is basically what the arc is doing to you.
There is an escape clause, though. If
you’re an artistic or lit analysis type like me, you can make it
through to the end and find something worthwhile for the journey. If
you’re a glutton for punishment who wants the weird flex of “I
survived the Endless Eight” and can keep your eyes on the prize, go
and get it. If, on the other hand, you’re an anime viewer who wants
entertainment… watch the first episode of the arc, maybe one of the
middle six, and the last. If you treat it only as 2-3 episodes and
not 8, the mental damage will be fairly limited, and there’s some
damn funny and also cool stuff in the arc, at least the first time or
two you see it. A truncated Endless Eight experience does miss out
on something, but I think for most people it’s not going to be
anything you’ll lament being rid of.
So, assuming you survived the Endless
Eight, the final major arc (after which there are a few more one-off
episodes to round out the show) is the Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya,
wherein the SOS brigade makes a movie for the cultural festival.
Compared to the weight and strange beauty of Melancholy or the
meta-level trolling of the Endless Eight, Sigh is much less
memorable. Haruhi is a predictably bad writer/director (having big
ideas, no concept of how to execute that vision, and no script
preferring to just ‘wing it’) and a predictably amusing casting
director (Mikuru plays a time-traveler, Koizumi an Esper, and Nagato
an Alien. Kyon? He’s the cameraman… and narrator). Of course,
during filming, reality conforms to Haruhi’s whims with out-of-season
cherry blossoms, talking cats, or Mikuru gaining eye lasers, and the
rest of the Brigade has to do their best to limit the damage by
reminding her that they’re working on fiction here.
Probably the biggest moment out of the
arc is the one time in the show where Haruhi actually crosses a
serious line from comic mischief to a really abusive move, spiking
Mikuru’s drink with alcohol so that she’ll sit still for a ‘love
scene’ with Koizumi. Kyon interrupts the scene, very rightly calls
Haruhi out, and despite knowing exactly what she is and how dangerous
she is very nearly slaps Haruhi for her flagrant mistreatment of her
friends. I have to hand it to the show for not really letting Haruhi
get away with that one. Kyon, whose opinion she actually cares
about, is properly incensed, and Haruhi it seems is actually capable
of feeling miserable regret. Of course, in part because a sorrowful
and regretful Haruhi is a dangerous Haruhi, everybody does reconcile
in short order, but they never attempt to play off what she did as OK
or funny the way a lot of her other tyrannical moments can be.
As an extra little cherry on top, we
actually get to see the movie the SOS Brigade makes as its own
episode! Technically, “The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina” isn’t
part of the Sigh arc – it was the first episode of season 1 in
broadcast order for reasons I will never comprehend – and… it’s
exactly the right stylistic suck. It’s a terrible short movie, but
terribly funny to watch, especially when you know exactly how the
mess got made.
And with that, we come to the end of
the recap… There are some other one-offs, some of which are quite
good, but the big movements of the plot are covered. So how does
Haruhi hold up?
Well, even discounting the Endless
Eight, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The characters, except for Kyon
and Haruhi, are entertaining enough, but they’re also very
one-noted… except when they’re not. They play to type 90%, even
95% of the time but the last bit that gives them a lot of actual
nuance can’t be ignored, and helps set them apart from less skillful
imitations. The stories are fluff that’s more “warm smile” funny
than “laugh out loud” funny despite the occasional comedic
push… except when they go more cerebral or even darker and really
explore the bizarre existence that is being in the vicinity of Haruhi
Suzumiya, which is rare but happens. It’s a show that feels like
it’s not taking any real risks or leaving the comfort zone… except
then it goes full troll on the audience. Everything I think I want
to say about the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, I find that I could
also say the opposite if I want to cherry-pick my examples.
The one thing I least want to
contradict, though, is enjoyment. True, there’s the Endless Eight
for messing with that, but I’ve talked enough about that arc, and
outside it? I enjoyed this show, pretty much the whole way through.
I enjoyed the bizarrely philosophical treatments of Haruhi and her
status when the show wanted to go philosophical, and I enjoyed the
goofy comedy when the show wanted to go funny. It’s inoffensive for
the most part (again with that one big exception), but not in the way
that actually means “dull” or “uninspired”. There’s almost
always a clever creativity to the story or the presentation, and just
like Haruhi herself is good at brazenly dragging her friends into all
her zany schemes, the show is pretty good about pulling you along,
promising and delivering a good time with its high – but not
overdone – energy.
In the end, considering everything, I
do consider The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to retain an A-.
That’s pretty much as high as its grade would have ever been; it’s
not an inspired masterpiece or anything like that, but it’s
consistently fun and sometimes more. And the one time it’s less than
fun, it’s also more, and retains my respect even as it loses my
patience. With the caveats already listed, I would recommend it
wholly.