夏のあらし！ Episode 08
Natsu no Arashi! – 08
(Summer Storm)

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Hajime walks in on Jun and Kaja changing and teases Jun for being a girly man. After Jun changes, Master decides she wants some watermelons that are currently on sale and sends Hajime to get them. Hajime drafts fellow “male” Jun to assist since this is man work. Coming back, Hajime is amazed at how weak Jun is since Jun can only carry one watermelon and Hajime carries five. He decides to help by taking a short cut but that means climbing the steps of a nearby shrine.

Reaching the top, both are parched and only have enough money for one beverage from the vending machine. Hajime has Jun drink first, then he takes a swig. When offering Jun a second drink, she declines (indirect kissing) and when he insists, Jun loses her balances and falls. Hajime attempts to grab Jun and the two tumble down the stairs and discover they’ve swapped bodies.

Back at the Ark, Master discovers a carton of unopened milk is way passed its expiration date. Since she hates the waste, she has a brilliant idea — send Arashi and/or Kaja back in time to a date prior to the expiration date on the milk carton. Kaja tries to explain that this won’t solve the problem of the milk being spoiled but Master says that if the milk is taken back into the past before the expiration date on the carton, everything is fine. Arashi sees the logic in that and agrees that this should be done, which frustrates Kaja as she can’t make Master or Arashi understand that this won’t actually solve any problems.

Jun-Hajime and Hajime-Jun arrive and try to explain that they’ve swapped bodies. Arashi thinks they are just pretending to be each other, so she does a good imitation of Master. Jun-Hajime and Hajime-Jun protest that this isn’t what they are trying to do, but even Kaja doesn’t believe their story and does her own imitation of Master, which Master finds very annoying.

Its lunch time and Hajime-Jun is scarfing out to Jun-Hajime’s dismay. Hajime-Jun feels that Jun needs to put on some weight and since Jun’s stomach is too small, eating a lot will expand it. Hajime-Jun realizes he needs to take a wiz to the horror of Jun-Hajime. As such, Jun-Hajime pleads with Hajime-Jun as a friend to never go to the bathroom in her body.

Hajime-Jun isn’t down with that and goes to the bathroom, only to find he has no penis or balls. Hajime-Jun is horrified and demands to check Jun-Hajime to make sure his body still has all its equipment, which Jun refuses to allow. In the end, Jun-Hajime whacks Hajime-Jun on the head to allow her body to take a leak.

Hajime and Jun attempt to decide what to do next and how they will live if they can’t swap back. Neither is happy with the performance of the other. Master wants to resolve the milk issue so she wants someone to go back in time and drink the milk in the past to see who’s right and who’s not. Neither Jun nor Hajime are down for this especially since it could make them stay in their current bodies or they may actually be forced to drink spoiled milk.

The two flee with the milk on a bicycle and when Master gives pursuit on her scooter-bike, Jun-Hajime tosses the expired milk back, hitting Master in the face and forcing her to crash. Jun and Hajime arrive back at the temple grounds and share a beverage again. An angry Master soon arrives and when they try to flee, all three end up tumbling down the steps and land with the detective — all four swapping bodies.

Thoughts/Review:

This episode will likely get added into my top-20 funniest anime episodes of all time (that I’ve seen of course). First, the absurd logic bit with Master trying to get Kaja and Arashi to take expired, spoiled milk back in time so that its not expired any more was funny. Arashi totally bought into the absurd logic that if you take an unopened milk carton with an expired date stamp into the past prior to its expiration date, it has to be OK because not expired any more — that was very funny, especially with how frustrated Kaja got trying to get them bot to see the wrongness of this thought concept.  Of course, Jun and Hajime had their own share of absurd logic considering their situation. Absurd logic — gotta love it (except when it come from our hideous elected leaders, but that’s something for a different platform).

What made this so funny and a potential top-20 candidate is Hajime’s and Jun’s body-switch and the events that happened thereafter. Arashi and Kaja not understanding what Hajime and Jun experienced and thus performing an imitation of Master made me laugh. It got better with Jun desperate to keep Hajime from discovering “he’s” a “she” when Hajime suddenly needed to take a leak. Hajime’s freaking out over losing Jun’s balls and penis nearly had me falling out of my chair, as did his frequent come back to what he considered a terrible problem. *LOL* Lucky for Jun, Hajime is so thick and didn’t catch on the Jun’s body is in fact a girl’s body. So I have to give it to SHAFT for creating something so very wrong and oh so funny. ^_^

On the negative front, I’m really starting to get annoyed with SHAFT’s hideous jokes that are run so deeply into the ground, they’ve pass through the Earth’s core and are now boring their way through to the crust on the other side of the planet. *_* Seriously, how did these boring joke sequences get here in the first place? I imagine someone in charge at SHAFT saw the first one with Yayoi and Kanako and the book reading and laughed until they crapped their pants. So the production team said, “If the boss laughs that hard, we have to put more and more of these into each episode, right?” *_* Well, at least they changed up the salt joke this time.

Amazingly though, this episode is the best and worst that SHAFT can bring to a table. At times, SHAFT can be amazingly funny and at times so stupid and pointless, one wonders what the heck they were smoking when they produced the tripe.

Despite the episode ending the the 4-way body swap, I rather doubt that the next episode touches on this aspect. After all, that is generally how these things go in comedy anime tales — have a nutty comedy ending and then move on next week with everything back to normal. We’ll see what happens though.

So through eight episodes, I still like this series well enough despite those terrible Yayoi-Kanako segments.

Here’s a bonus image of Jun as a girl. Scary, isn’t it? ^_^