The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi Season 2 Episode 1 - "Sorry to be late!"

So they aired a new Haruhi episode.

For the longest time, I really thought that Haruhi had some of the most ruthless capitalist minds Japan had to offer at its helm. The massive amounts of Haruhi figmas, crappy video games and merch they released coupled with things like Lucky Star (which is basically a giant commercial for Haruhi merchandise) made me conclude that these people were out to cut the purses of every hapless young man who has ever had a positive thought towards Haruhi.

Recent events have made me reconsider this...

Haruhi appears to be airing in this manner: They're showing reruns of the original series in chronological (ew) order. When they come to a part of the series where there's a story from the original novels to insert, they put in a new episode. Without warning. So last week's episode was the baseball episode. This week's was Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody... and then next week will be that episode where the Computer Society President is possessed by that giant bug. The next new episode will probably be in a month. And then there's another month of reruns between that new episode and the next.

The only reasoning I can think of for this is that kind of schedule is that someone at the studio doesn't actually want anyone to see the new episodes.

Say it with me now: What the fuck.

Anyhow, that aside, let's talk about the episode...



I read Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody over a year ago It's a nice little story that does the rare thing of bringing in all of the characters at the same time smoothly. So often Haruhi storylines will be segregated. There'll be a Nagato story and then a Mikuru story and then a Koizumi story. They don't really overlap in a significant way. What I like about Bamboo is that it manages to do character development for everyone (except maybe Koizumi) with one continuous story.


I've always been of the opinion that Haruhi works a lot better as an anime than it does as a novel. A character like Nagato, whose main feature is pregnant silences, just doesn't work very well when said pause is just the author writing 'and then she was quiet. And without a visual presence, Mikuru doesn't really work either. She's just the annoying useless ditz that Kyon pays WAY too much attention to for some inexplicable reason. Ditzy cutesy chicks are a lot easier to accept with an image than it is through text (which is something the author would do well to learn).



But a lot of other things come across a lot better visually... Nagato mouthing something before closing the door. The novel didn't dwell on her doing that at all, which is a crying shame. That's the kind of scene that you can interpret a couple of different ways and it is left nicely ambiguous.


So all in all, I think I feel comfortable saying that I enjoyed seeing Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody a lot more than I enjoyed reading, which is about the best you can ask for from an adaptation.

Still... Haruhi has some fundamental problems. Mainly: Balance of characters.


The author treats his main characters as equals (sorta... Koizumi certainly doesn't get as much screentime as everyone else). That's a good idea on paper, but it actually turns out to be a really bad one in practice. The reason for this is simple: No matter which way you shake it, an alien cyborg intelligence that has come to Earth to act as an observer does not weigh evenly with a ditzy redhead from the future.

So even though this episode integrated all the characters in a nice and unified way, it only really got good when Haruhi and Nagato had their scenes. Mikuru's scenes were mildly cute but wore thin after a little while. Then Haruhi's bit was great and Nagato's was fantastic. But the problem is they all had more or less equal time.



There's a reason why Lieutenant Barcley was never a regular member of the TNG cast. He's a fun guy and I love his episodes, but if he had as many episodes dedicated to him as, say, Data he would quickly lose his charm. Mikuru hasn't got half of Broccoli's charm and yet she gets put on even footing with Nagato and Haruhi both.

This is why for much as I love Haruhi, I don't have a very high opinion of the author. To be frank: he's a fucking amateur. He has good ideas and bad ideas and doesn't have a damn clue how to tell the two apart and just throws them all at the canvass in a big mess. Occasionally, when he's throwing the right ones, he'll manage to write something completely brilliant. But for a fair chunk of the time, he's just embarrassing himself.