Recap: The Choir and Sometimes Badminton Club celebrates a victory for the badminton side, but this time without Wakana. Attempting to cope with all the recent talk about her mother, she tries rid herself of the things that bring back memories of her.

Jel’s Thoughts: Tari Tari does their best Key impersonation this episode, gut punching us with a few flashbacks of Wakana’s mother’s final days. As much as I want to criticize the show for following such an obvious progression of events, they still effectively drummed up the right emotions to help us understand Wakana a little better. That itself is an accomplishment, as this is the first time I’ve felt emotional invested at all with this series.

Grief can be a difficult thing to depict. To the outside viewer, a lot of things that happen when someone is dying or passes away seem completely irrational. My first instinct was to get angry at Wakana’s parents for not telling her about her mother’s illness and later at Wakana for wanting to get rid of her things. But if you’ve ever been in a similar situation where you’re losing a loved one, it’s impossible to predict how you might feel and what you might do until you’re going through it. From that perspective, I think this episode did a good job handling the subject matter in a appropriate way. They don’t want you to think those were the right choices, they’re just showing them so we understood their frame of mind.

After such a heavy episode it will be interesting to see how Tari Tari pulls itself back to business as usual. I’m hoping it will continue to be about Wakana dealing with her grief and nothing silly like Konatsu slapping her in the face to snap out of it or something. I really hope it doesn’t come to that nor do I think it will, but this is anime so we’ll how it pans out.

[No glib remarks this time, watch Tari Tari on Crunchyroll]