The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Episode 9

 

Episode 9 - “Wasn’t it funny?  I was totally expecting it!”

As Kyon goes to retrieve the heater, he is overhears one girl bragging to another that she totally saw this coming.

As people likely know, Someday in the Rain (henceforth Rain) is anime-original, yet there were many volumes that could have been adapted.  Therefore, the fact that the Haruhi production team chose to make this episode (along with the LN author as script writer) can tell us quite a bit.  What did they need?  What is it that none of the existing LN chapters could have provided?  The answer is: nothing.  Nothing happens.  And that’s exactly what Haruhi needs.

The way I break this series down mentally is that there was an introduction (Adventures), a first arc where we were trying to form our idea of this world and were surprised to find it was supernatural (Melancholy I, II, III and Boredom), a second where we were trying to apply our supernatural ideas of this world only to find mundane answers (Island I, II and Sign), and now… what?  We’ve already been toyed with twice and there’s no way that we aren’t going to be on the lookout for a third try.  The episode dangles in front of our nose the fact that we know something should happen, due to Suzumiya or otherwise, and we anticipate all these different leads we’re being offered will build into a bigger plot.  But no.  Nothing.  Not a single thing.  This episode adapts no genre, has no useful references, and therefore gives us no structure on which to predict it.  That’s how you trick us a third time.

In the mean time, Haruhi comments with some amusement on this fact.  It doesn’t matter if we see it coming, it doesn’t matter if we know we’re being manipulated, we’ll still fall for its tricks at least three times.  This triple joke comes out in particular around Asahina being stripped.  We know she’s fanservice that lures attention, and we know we aren’t going to get a peep of her body, but we’ll watch her location (and try to overlook Nagato) anyway.  Then Haruhi cuts to the girl on the train remarking she saw it coming, showing her great superiority of perception… only to send us back to Asahina and our inevitable tendency to keep watching anyway.

The radio segments with Nagato serve a similar purpose, although with double duty.  I’ll return to her below, but in the meantime I want to note what function they serve for us and how it is similar to Adventures.  At this point, Haruhi risks having us become bored knowing it will try to mislead us, so it has to do something of a soft reset of our expectations.  Abusing the fact that we’ve “caught on” to finding its clues, Haruhi feeds us this string of radio nonsense and lets us try to make anything out of it.  There are just enough phrases in there (looks like a child on the outside but unsure about inside, changing character when singing on stage, a culprit, or using the name Yuki) to keep us transfixed; we know some of this is from the past and therefore some of it might be relevant too.  However, because of the mixed-in garbage we can’t use it to predict anything; as far as I’m aware, little yellow-green shrimp play no role in Haruhi.  It’s similar to looking around the room at the different known and unknown objects or having Kyon pass locations we’ve both seen and not seen before.  All of these reference things, but these references are essentially useless as they can only be understood in retrospect.  Hence my likening Rain to Adventures: we started comfortable and it threw us for a loop, leaving us trying to guess what parts of it were true.  Now we’re getting a little too complacent, and Haruhi is going to make us doubt that we really caught everything that’s going on.

However, in the middle of this we do get genuine pieces of Suzumiya and Nagato.  Besides the obvious affection-reveal that I mentioned yesterday (we didn’t solve the mystery during the Island arc, so now Haruhi has to give up and just tell us the answer), we also get bits of her development.  As I’ve intermittently maintained, Suzumiya develops in Broadcast order, and what we see here is a sign of her middle state: she now acknowledges that Kyon is her conscience, but she hasn’t internalized the lesson yet.  She only stops doing things because it upsets him, not because she’s quite faced up to it being wrong, and so comes up with one of her oh-so-effective multipurpose plans to get him out of the way (and get a heater for herself, and have him get the heater he wanted anyway, and get him to be productive rather than waste his life...) so she can still do what she wants.  Same pattern as always: first dressing Asahina up, pointing out how the mascot will attract attention, and then running out there herself to show off how much better she is.  She’s not quite there yet.

What really surprised me this rewatch, though, was seeing Nagato’s circumstances.  Ironically but appropriately, I thought I wasn’t going to write much on today’s episode, thinking I would use the space to write about Suzumiya’s character, but afterward my emphasis on Nagato shouldered that out.

Previously I had thought of this as a “hinge” episode and saw the next two as building Nagato’s story in preparation for Suzumiya’s.  What I didn’t realize was how brutally Rain makes the point that Nagato is treated like furniture.  She doesn’t say a word the whole episode and we may not even notice (something we’ve joked about before).  She can fill up the whole frame and all we want to do is see behind her (something she gives us a disapproving look for).  Everybody else goes and does things and leaves her in the room, with the radio segments driving home that people are interacting and having fun… but elsewhere, not with her.  Tsuruya only drops by to ask where Asahina is.  Kyon’s only words to Nagato in the whole episode are, “Where is everyone else?”.  Kyon warms his hands to a clear shot of Nagato who must also be cold but he doesn’t invite her to join him.  Bored with nothing to do and a two-player game in front of him, Kyon falls asleep rather than ask Nagato to play (he knows she likes games).  As Kyon passes out staring at Nagato he thinks about how tired he is after working, reminding us Nagato has been working this whole time).  After an indeterminate period of time passes, she stands up, outwardly normal but obviously disappointed… and yet she still leaves her cardigan for him.  I don’t think I ever really reflected on how greatly Nagato, Suzumiya's most inner self, was neglected.

Other Notes:

• That first shot of the sky has such a resemblance to Kyon’s reflections last episode.   Which is a great mislead.
  
  
• In Rain the camerawork is unusual.  Rather than the usual angles we get God’s eye shots and unnatural from-the-corner views.  It zips to random locales to check on characters and then returns… to the empty room.   Today’s camerawork reflects Nagato’s semi-omniscient view, as this is the only episode that does not contain Kyon in every scene.  The result is quite depressing: in an episode where there is nothing else to think about, she can see still nobody bothers to think about her.  The most poignant shot for me was this one viewing the group across the way.  It gives off such a sense of distance, being through the glass, and in a state where we are able to see but unable to hear or interact (the one-way radio reinforces this, with this “fight-o fight-o” that matches what could be being said as Tsuruya prances around).  When Tsuruya asks where Asahina is, Nagato points out the window and you realize that they’re so close yet so far.  Then later, when Kyon asks Nagato where everybody is, she waits for him to inquire after her, but eventually tilts her head, peering across the way to where she’d last seen the rest of the gang before they all moved on. 
  
  
• As Kyon looks around the room he pauses to look at a pile of laptops and a prominently-displayed game T(s)undere Gunslinger III.  Even if it’s mockery, it makes me happy to no end when my #2 anime series references my #1, Gunslinger Girl.   Considering Suzumiya is (mis)classed as a tsundere, but actually has a lot of depth to its characters, I’ve decided this means Haruhi is praising GSG in the same way.  Right?  Right. 
  
  
• While I offer an explanation of Kyon’s transit backgrounds scrambling our expectations, it’s also awfully dismal.  I don’t know if, like the empty room shots that do double duty of messing-with-us plus showing Nagato’s loneliness, Kyon’s progress is similarly something we look for meaning in but is also the beginning of showing how dull this “normal” life is. 
  
  
• Kyon didn’t knock before entering the clubroom with the heater.   I have no explanation.  Was that a discrepancy put there to see if we’d try to make more of it? (Dammit, caught again) 
  
  
• Nagato left a book with a woman on the cover in front of where she was previously sitting.   ...do I even have to make the joke again as to whether this means Nagato is advertising she is a girl or if we’re just being screwed with…  

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