Recap: Tomoko has been in high school for three months now and has seen no changes in her popularity. She steps up her game by taking on a silent, expressionless personality, trying out a Puricura booth, and trying to adopt the social skills of a hostess.

Jel’s Thoughts: This episode has me worried that WataMote is going the direction I’ve feared the most: it’s getting boring. While I may not have been able to predict whatever mundane path to popularity Tomoko was going to choose, I knew immediately how each one was going to play out. There were no surprises and little character growth. I’ll admit the opening gag that dares to ask why silent, expressionless girls are popular was pretty decent satire, but the execution was pretty uninspired and probably went longer than it needed to. At least I’ll give Tomoko credit for figuring out why it wasn’t working for her. The final scene in the Red Light District did even less for me as it felt like it was solely there for shock value, but after last week’s episode I don’t think anything in WataMote is going to shock me at this point.

Fortunately the bits with Tomoko’s long suffering family continue to be a highlight of the series. I have to mention her mother’s brief appearance as her one, heavy mental sigh said so many thing without saying a word. It’s her interactions with her brother though that are really spot on. The scene with the “Cola-Cola” had the most perfect comedic timing possible, and Tomoko’s subsequent photo bombing of his room made the dull Puricura scene worth it.

This wasn’t really a bad episode per se but it’s pretty much pushed me to the threshold of how much I’m willing to keep going with WataMote. As great as Tomoko’s interactions with her brother have been, even those are starting to wear a little thin. Perhaps even more troubling is I really don’t see where else the series can go. I never expected any great amounts of story or progress, and aside from going for more shock value discomfort, where else can they go? Hopefully the random, delightfully bizarre new ED was an indication there’s a few more surprises in store for us.

Zigg’s Thoughts: It’s a welcome return to (mostly) tasteful territory this week but as Jel observed, the law of diminishing returns is setting in rather sharply. By this point it’s become pretty obvious that Watamote is essentially a sketch show – each episode contains 2-4 vignettes of various length, each of which basically revolves around the same joke. Namely, Tomoko misunderstands some social idiom to hilarious consequences. I’m not saying that the show is no longer funny (it can be) but the ‘we have basically one joke’ is eerily reminiscent of SIlver Link’s previous work Baka and Test, and that didn’t go well at all.

One other frustrating this, to me at least, is the lack of ‘movement’ in the storyline. Look, I understand that Watamote doesn’t have an overarching plot because it’s a slice of life show. That’s fine, and stuff like that can be done well. But other slice of life shows (or at least the good ones) compensate by showcasing character interaction and, if we’re lucky, the development of the relationships between those characters. That doesn’t work here because…well, there are no characters. Sure, other people drift in and out of the story but really this is a tale about Tomoko in a bubble, and that’s beginning to ring false to me. She needs a foil, or an objective, or an enemy – basically, anybody who she can have an actual interaction with. The reason the scenes with her brother are universally the best ones are because there’s actually character writing there, as opposed to just monologuing.

As it is, there were still enjoyable moments in this show. The purika section may just be an excuse to do dumb faces but I still laughed, and the spinning shot in the red light district and the end is a great artistic flourish. Perhaps my favourite joke was Tomoko’s immediate reaction to the hostess idea – the imagery of being timed on your cigarette lighting skills is wonderfully bizarre but also is a great example of her childish naivete not matching up with the more adult world she constantly is dabbling in. It’s that sort of contrast which I feel has characterised the show’s stronger moments. More of that and less jokes on repeat would help a bounce-back.