境界のRINNE ep 33
Kyoukai no RINNE 33

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Suzuki-sensei gives Rinne a 3-stack bento box full of umeboshi to eat, but nothing else. After school, Miho, Rika, and Sakura discuss cursed straw dolls, then encounter a ghost hammering one in at a shrine. Sakura reports this to Rinne after discovering the now vanished straw doll had contained an image of a younger Suzuki-sensei. Rinne causes the doll to appear, causing the ghost of KANOU Yoko to appear. She’d been the class president when Suzuki-sensei was training and had fallen for him. However, when she gave him her e-mail address, he never e-mailed her. However, when he got hired the next year, Yoko was devastated to discover Suzuki-sensei had gotten a boyfriend and attempted to curse him. However, she later regretted it, but then died of food poisoning before she could remove the doll.

In the present, Suzuki-sensei denies knowing Yoko to Sakura and Rinne, causing Yoko to want to curse him again. Rinne prevents that, but wonders why their teacher would deny knowing a former student. He discovers, with Yoko tailing along, that Suzuki-sensei pays a visit to Yoko’s home to pay respects at the shrine for Yoko and to talk with Yoko’s mother, who shows him Yoko’s diary, much to Yoko’s dismay. At school the next day, Sakura and Rinne confront Suzuki-sensei, where he acknowledges Yoko and explains that he accidentally lost her e-mail address. Later at the shrine, Suzuki-sensei shows up and sees the doll, wondering why it is there since he’d removed the one from when Yoko died. Rinne arranges for Yoko and Sensei to have final words, which allows her to pass. Suzuki-sensei regrets not having told her that she was indirectly responsible for him meeting his current girlfriend.

Thoughts/Review:

This is one of those episodes that is funny, yet tragic at the same time.

On the humor side, we get the gag over Yoko’s death. She falls down the shrine stairs (which are long as they go up a hillside), but that doesn’t kill her. She falls into an open manhole cover into the sewer, but that doesn’t kill her. Then she’s attacked by dogs, but that doesn’t kill her. Instead, she’s killed when she got food poisoning. I’m just rolling my eyes.

Also on the gag side is Rinne being gifted with food items that aren’t good by themselves, but go good with rice. Yet no one gifts him rice. Eating corn dogs with umeboshi does sound as nasty as Rinne implied it was in the episode.

On the tragic side of things is here we have yet another student tied to the school Rinne and Sakura attend who’s died.  That was one of the problems I had with the manga. After a while of encountering student ghost after student ghost, one would think this high school would have a reputation of being cursed and causing students to drop dead left and right over the years.

Yoko’s unrequited love was also a tragic thing, though she is a bit yandere in her feelings with the, “I love him, but if he doesn’t feel the same, then I’m going to curse him to death!” I had expected Suzuki-sensei’s not responding to Yoko’s obvious feelings for him as being professional detachment. After all, I think Rinne, Sakura, and company are 14 to 15 years old. So Yoko being 14 or even 15 would mean that even if Suzuki-sensei had feelings for her, it isn’t legal for them to have a romantic relationship. The fact that the story just had Suzuki-sensei be dense and accidentally lose Yoko’s e-mail address just made me roll my eyes a bit.

Speaking of dense, I did get a chuckle out of Sak ura’s remarks on how dense Suzuki-sensei was, yet she seems pretty dense about Rinne’s feelings for her. Not that the series has made much of that this season, but there you go.

In the end, Kyoukai no RINNE 33 was an entertaining episode filled with gag humor, but laced with a tragic element that for me, overshadowed the gag comedy.