Grand Blue Dreaming

Episode 8

The first of this week's two segments is yet another one of those sketches that seems content to land mostly within the “pleasantly watchable” range of the comedy spectrum, spending the majority of its ten minutes with the Peek-A-Boo gang just hanging out at the bar where Kotobuki works in his free time. There are a couple of chuckle-worthy jokes that involve Iori and Kohei getting raunchy ideas about the kind of part-time gig Kotobuki must have, but not much else is laugh-out-loud funny. The guys need to earn some cash for their upcoming trip to Okinawa, so the friendly bar owner lets them hang out and even practice their own bartending skills, while the girls get to be amused at how bad Iori and Kohei are at mixing drinks that consist of more than just vodka and whiskey.

It's mostly just nice hangout time with the crew, though it does consist of one exceptionally funny joke. Iori and Kohei have no idea what to make of even the most common cocktails, so when they see Azusa order a simple gin lime, they assume that all recipes can be sorted out based on their names. This of course leads to shenanigans when Aina orders a Screwdriver and instead of receiving vodka and orange juice, she gets a glass filled with vodka and a literal screwdriver. The real clincher comes when the boys recognize their mistake and fix it by replacing the Philips-Head screwdriver with a flat-bladed one, once again proving that repetition combined with proper comedic timing can make for a great one-two joke combo. The same can't be said for the way the sketch ends, with the bar owner mistaking Iori for gay and immediately assuming he's some kind of predator, just another of the dozens of crappy gay panic bits that Grand Blue Dreaming falls back on when it runs out of ideas.

The second story of the week is another one of those dreaded stories that involve Iori and Kohei's college buddies getting all weird about their inability to get laid, so you can imagine how surprised I was to find this week's variation on the premise to actually be funny. The show has always leaned into the boys' pathetic natures with these segments, but until now it never quite went far enough to justify the ugliness of the joke. The stories were too basic and familiar to successfully sell their crassness as funny.

But this week, things finally cross over into being so silly and stupid that the crudeness at last comes full circle back around to being amusing. We've seen how irrationally violent Shinichiro and crew get at the thought of Iori even cohabitating with an attractive woman, but things get really weird when they all discover that one of their comrades in perpetual virginity, Yu, has stopped hanging out with them because he's been having Actual Real Sex With a Human Woman™. Naturally, their first instinct is to interrupt the couple mid-coitus with a bunch of manipulative pranks.

I won't lie, I was just impressed to watch an anime where two adults were depicted having a regular sex life, and I'm willing to admit I found it pretty funny to see that healthy pairing utterly destroyed in mere minutes. It's one thing to shove Shinchiro's hundreds of porn DVDs through Yu's mail slot, or for Iori to send fake messages to his phone that almost get Yu completely choked out by his bedroom buddy, Rie. But the best bit of the whole vignette was how quickly Kohei's disinterest in the pranks turned into soul-consuming rage when he discovers that Rie is a childhood friend who just so happens to affectionately refer to Yu as her “onii-chan" in bed. This causes Kohei to bust out his secret talent, which is an uncanny ability to replicate the voices of the anime girls he obsesses over, which finally pushes Rie to her breaking point.

One of the reasons this sequence worked for me where similar ones from before failed is the gang's stone-faced commitment to completely ruining what seemed to be a perfectly good relationship. The episode's final moments see the men weepy and cheering when Yu gets kicked to the curb by his understandably furious ex-girlfriend, since it only takes him about fifteen seconds of being single to ask after Rie's friends. Iori and the others embrace Yu as a true blue loser just like them, and I'm much more willing to embrace more terrible members of Grand Blue Dreaming's cast when the joke is entirely on the absurd and sad antics these dummies get up to, and not so much on the poor souls who have to suffer on the receiving end of their nonsense.

Rating: B-

Grand Blue Dreaming is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.