Recap: Houtarou and Chitanda spend an afternoon in the clubroom coming up with hypothetical theories.

Iro’s Thoughts: It seems I was proven right when I predicted this last arc would be more focused around Houtarou and Chitanda’s relationship. In fact, Satoshi and Mayaka don’t even get a token appearance this episode – it was all the not-couple this time. And just like last week, it’s a slow episode where essentially nothing happens, unless you count a whole lot of sexual tension as something.

As the two sit around the clubroom table, a small argument erupts over Houtarou’s ability to create theories for the mysteries they’ve encountered so far. Chitanda insists that he’s skilled at it, and he says he’ll come up with some outlandish theory to prove her wrong. They take a conveniently-placed announcement over the school PA for inspiration, and get to work on solving the “mystery”. And so, Houtarou manages to take that one sentence and extrapolate the entire premise of (as well as the correct answer to) the Mystery of the PA Announcement, while Kyoto Animation spends lots of money on weird artistic interludes to avoid having an entire episode of talking heads.

Oh, and Chitanda asks him out on a date to light incense on her uncle’s grave.

Next week seems to be an episode about the New Year, which means Chitanda wearing a kimono and such.

Marlin’s Thoughts: I am an impatient person. It doesn’t help that the past few seasons I’ve been reliably finding at least one show to get all mushy about that actually moves its romance at a reasonable pace. Chii is still adorable and as much as this will-they-won’t-they episode pained me, getting a half hour of adorable Chii faces was definitely worth it.

Jel’s Thoughts: This says it all.