Yumeiro Patissiere Professional 4 is a low-key episode. This is usually the case when there’s a crisis. Also, overall this new series is less silly. Maybe it’s because the characters are older.
Or maybe it’s that the series turns to the most quiet and dullest of the team: Andou. He doesn’t have the personality to make his crises interesting. Well, never mind, he is an important character, so let’s pay attention to him for a while. After he collapses from exhaustion he’s talked into taking a few days off to recuperate. Worried about the shop’s profits, he still can’t relax. The others spend time sympathizing with him or admonishing him. Johnny’s lecture about “chance loss and disposal loss” helps a little in thinking about what’s wrong with the shop, but for the time being they still ignore another big problem: they’re understaffed! But that comes later.
Much is made about helping people out in times of need. Johnny can’t figure it out, and frankly I too was thinking that the characters were worrying about Andou and ignoring their own problems, for their own shops aren’t selling much either. But the chance loss theory comes up again and the characters realize that they should work together in one shop, not do their individual thing (Johnny, the typical individualist American, is the one vote against this). Interestingly, Andou is shown to be an individualist himself, so we suddenly have solutions for both shops.
The show gets a little maudlin here. It’s a long scene where Andou is persuaded by everyone (including Satsuki, whom Kashino has brought in) to let everyone contribute. Now the assistant girls can help cook and the place bursts with new ideas. Even Johnny lends a hand in one of those “I’m an ass but I have a heart of gold” bits. Now that Andou and his shop have recovered we can turn to using the same teamwork to rescue Team Ichigo’s, or Lemon’s or whoever’s turn it is to have a line. But I think we’ll have to wait. Next week it looks to be all fairies, which means silliness returns!
Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru 3 … hmm, this sometimes annoying series is growing on me. The first story was a lot of fun. Homeroom teacher Moriaki, who, like everyone else, thinks Hotori is a blithering idiot, comes to her for advice because she has “a sense of the extraordinary.” His grandfather’s paintings were split among the descendants, and he wound up with a weird one.
Hotori’s task: figure out what the hell his grandfather was on about, especially since he also painted one with the correct number of eyes. It’s a fun story for a few reasons. First, it’s a legitimate mystery. I was trying to figure it out myself. Second, it lets the other characters come up with their own flawed or absurd theories. Third, for the first time in the series we see Hotori as something BESIDES a blithering idiot.
I mean it. She used every clue that flew right by me and came up with a logical and, as it turns out, correct theory. Good thing, too. I sometimes get tired of her antics. It was also an imaginative solution that made me go “Oh, so THAT’S why they mentioned such-and-such.”
The second story isn’t as good. Off to buy vegetables (and getting the order wrong again) Hotori meets a boy trying to coax his cat out of a narrow alley. Nothing much to it, but the boy is not what she thinks, and so we have the final member of the band that plays during the closing credits.
Too Old for Anime 