Short Series: Angel Beats, Ep. 4 - "Day Game"

A baseball episode?!

To be honest, there isn’t much story-related material to talk about here. Episode 4 (“Day Game”) has virtually nothing to do with the overarching plot at hand. The only remotely interesting things that happen are the induction of Yui into the Battlefront, who is going to serve as the replacement vocalist for Girls Dead Monster, and the revelation of Hinata’s backstory (yeah, that one blue-haired guy who got beat up all the time, because the writers decided he was apparently more than just a hapless bastard) that coincides with the titular baseball game. Otherwise, this episode is pure, random nonsense, throwing out all of the exposition and world-building that fooled the viewer into believing Angel Beats would be an epic, mysterious, dark show about the struggles of flawed people in a strange purgatory and turning it into a twenty-minute long comic opera.

It’s lazy. The animation has degraded considerably, and there’s nothing visually interesting going on here. If there’s one thing Angel Beats had going for it up until this episode, it was good visual direction. The beautiful, realistic lighting and use of imagery as metaphor in Episode 3 was stunning; the enormous, industrial design of the Guild in Episode 2 was, to my mind, even better. Episode 4? Nothing. “Day Game” is pure filler, in a series that desperately doesn’t need filler (13 episodes isn’t a whole lot of time, guys). It also brings up a very important issue: we have no fucking clue who Otonashi is.

"It's okay. The writers forgot about me, too."

Sure, Otonashi is an everyman; it’s been shown he plays the Straight Man to everyone’s crazy, outrageous antics. But other than that, it’s next to impossible to get a bead on what kind of guy he is. Iwasawa, the chick who died last episode, was a fully-realized character, and she was barely on screen for more than fifteen minutes. Even without her fairly lengthy backstory, she was a fully-realized character; she had a specific job and purpose, her own specific talents, likes, dislikes, and intelligence level, and her character arc resolved itself cleanly and perfectly. Otonashi, who has been on screen for considerably longer than fifteen minutes, has nothing to his character. I don’t know what his likes, dislikes, talents, or flaws are. And his amnesia has jack shit to do with it. Take The Bourne Identity, a well-known film featuring an amnesiac protagonist. In the opening ten or so minutes of the film, we learn all we need to know about Jason Bourne within that timeframe; we’re able to get a look into what his skills and personality are like. With Otonashi, we have jack shit, and he’s incapable of supporting an entire story on his own, even with the help of his fellow, one-dimensional partners in crime.

Anyway, let’s go to the “story”, not that it really matters. The monstrously obnoxious Yui auditions to take the place of the late Iwasawa in Girls Dead Monster, but nobody in the Battlefront agrees because she is monstrously obnoxious. Yuri suggests that the Battlefront take place in the primarily NPC-run baseball game because…?! THEY COULDN’T EVEN THINK UP A HALF-ASSED EXPLANATION FOR WHY YURI EVEN CONSIDERED PARTICIPATING IN THE BASEBALL GAME? Somebody got a paycheck for writing this. More than a handful of credited writers got actual cash for this.

They go off-model quite a bit in this episode, too, to the point where you wonder if there was a model to begin with.

Jesus Christ. Anyway, Hinata and Otonashi band together and try and form a baseball team, and Otonashi is a pompous dick for no reason, and the only team members they are able to recruit are the loud-mouthed Yui because duh, the uninteresting ninja girl, and the guy that beat the shit out of Otonashi in the first place, who decides to use his halberd instead of a baseball bat. Hinata’s human team faces off against Angel’s NPC team. Random shenanigans occur and a switch is flipped signaling the incoming “let me tell you about my past” missile, and this time, it’s Hinata’s backstory. Apparently Hinata was a baseball player who let his team down at a major tournament which understandably made him pretty depressed. In order to make him feel better, he’s given some drugs and steroids, which makes himimgsdmkgdnop pn0rizgtngiopnz fxgnzsfgsfhSFHnSFUIgy0SDfy0-bsd-ubuzdbdugsdghS7ADF9-GR8-TAWT78WETEBFUVJIPSDCNKLCVhklalgsdjklbguisdbgidbo;bnjobvsd;gvsd;

I’m sorry, I fell asleep on my keyboard. It’s impossible to catalogue all the ways this episode fails. It’s not even good as mindless slapstick, because almost all of the jokes contained within rely both on timing and the audience to presume that the codex of “annoying = immediately funny” is always true, no matter what. And Yui is one hell of an annoying character, which is unfortunate because she’s in, like, eighty percent of the episode. “Day Game” is incompetent largely because of how damn lackadaisical and boring it is; there’s no narrative missteps like there were in “Guild” because there is no narrative going on, and even the voice actors sound bored out of their minds. Maybe this episode has some kind of deep, hidden meaning behind it, but I have no reason to know or care about it. It’s trivial, disposable writing, and whipping up the energy to actively dislike is pretty pointless. Maybe Episode 5 will do a better job of keeping my attention.