Holy fucking shit, Funimation is garbage. Allow me to share a brief anecdote: when trying to change the audio for this episode back into Japanese, it played a series of ads, naturally, because why wouldn't a good streaming service play an ad every time you changed the audio track? But the Japanese audio suddenly started overlapping over the ad audio in some kind of chaotic mess... and then when the ads were finally over, the audio was in English even though the player definitely said it was on the JP track. Anyone that pays for Funimation's streaming services is getting fucking robbed. This felt like a glitch you run into in some kind of video game, except it was for a fucking video player. ???? Sitting through three rounds of ads just to get what you want... Funimation may be a great company but their fancy simulcast streaming service and player needs a ridiculous amount of patching. It barely functions, let alone feels like a viable alternative to Netflix or Hulu.
"Komaeda" (this is what I'm abbreviating the episode title to - "Melancholy, Surprise, Disappearance of..." is way too fucking long, man) isn't even a good enough episode to warrant all the extra legwork. This episode comes hot off the heels of "A Farewell To All Futures", a jarring departure from the established tone of the first two episodes and the first sign that something is genuinely wrong. Sure, the first episode had a lot of tonal problems, but at least it felt closer to the hyperactive and bombastic nature of Danganronpa than the slow-burning mirthlessness of Episode 3... and at least the first two episodes were willing to show everything they wanted to show. Episode 3 couldn't even summon the effort to show off the show's first murders. Episode 3 tainted the show with a sinking feeling of "DR3 will not be able to get over this episode's problems", and Episode 4 doesn't do much of anything to change your mind. Not by the second half, anyway.
The overall mood of the school has apparently darkened as a result of the deaths of Sato and Natsumi, two Reserve Course students that were constantly at each-other's throats; Chisa tries to cheer up and get her class as hyped as possible for the upcoming Practical Exams, but there's an obvious tension floating through the air that she can't do much to dissuade. This would be effective if Sato and Natsumi were even passably good characters and not cardboard cutouts that died before they could do anything... or if we at least got to see their MURDERS. Or at least their CORPSES. Sorry, some sins you just can't ignore. Danganronpa is The go-to series for lavish murders, you can't just kick things off on a note of absolute nothing and expect it to work.
The focus of this episode is thrown into the lap of Nagito Komaeda, a perpetually-lucky and strangely enthusiastic kid with an obvious hidden dark side to his character that hasn't been given much exploration until now. Komaeda's a pretty popular character, so it should come as no surprise that he'd be given some substantial focus here... but something feels off about him. In retrospect, Komaeda actually doesn't do much at all... this is probably the only episode where it feels like some of the narrative gears are turning for Komaeda. He decides that he wants to cancel the practical exams in order to like boost morale or something, so he tracks down Seiko Kimura, the masked, anxious, submissive pharmacist that helped Teruteru and Hiyoko make the Horny Juice shown in Episode 2... and yet another new character. Seiko is also joined by the cute but manipulative Ruruka Ando and her strong, silent bodyguard Izayoi, who are clearly using Seiko in order to obtain enhancement drugs... at least Ruruka is, anyway, who I think wants to use a specific drug of Seiko's to cheat on her presentation exams. Once again, DR3 keeps introducing more and more characters to an already stuffy cast (for twelve episodes, anyway; it truly doesn't need this many cooks in the kitchen) - and given the poor way it handled the last new characters in Episode 3, you can't help but wonder if Ruruka, Seiko, and Izayoi are doomed to die offscreen.
Well, that's not quite what happens - instead, they're doomed to irrelevance and they're merely expelled offscreen. See, due to Komaeda's amazing luck, he gets the drug that he wanted and the drug that Ruruka wanted mixed up. This is strange... Komaeda apparently just came for some kind of laxative? Was he counting on his luck to get the opposite thing that he wanted?? Was he planning on making his class have to go to the bathroom so badly that they couldn't take the exams?? The reason that Komaeda got introduced to Seiko was because he bribed Teruteru with a magazine full of sexy photos of Sayaka Maizono (a nice reference to DR1, admittedly)... but if a laxative was all he needed, did he really need to go through such a weird loop? This is one of those contrived situations that the show didn't really think about too much... but Komaeda's mixup is a situation that winds up working in Komaeda's favor and ultimately ruining Ruruka's plans, as predictably expected.
Komaeda puts up an anonymous poster, demanding the school cancel the practical exams under the threat of a bomb he placed somewhere in the school. Now there's the Danganronpa I've been expecting... it's a bit tame by DR standards, but at least it feels like we're initially getting somewhere. Komaeda and Seiko run into one another again, and hilarity ensues when they get their bags mixed up. I have to admit, it's impressive how confidently DR3 pulls the exact same trick twice. Ruruka presents her drug-enhanced sweets, expecting to completely clean house on her exams... but since her drugs are stuffed full of Komaeda's laxatives and not what Seiko concocted for her, the judges are stricken by the overwhelming desire to shit. This leads Ruruka to assume that Seiko set her up for failure, and right when Seiko tries to diffuse the situation... she opens "her" medicine bag, revealing the bomb and detonation charges that Komaeda intended to sic on the school. Dunno why this episode was so hot on ruining Seiko's life, man. Surely there were better ways to characterize Komaeda. Ruruka begins bitching at Seiko for being such a terrible friend, and Seiko rightly lambastes Ruruka for being a selfish brat... and then the bomb goes off in the gymnasium.
The baffling part about all of this? Despite the fact that Izayoi, Seiko, and Ruruka were undeniably in the gym when the bomb went off (Seiko and Ruruka were right on top of the detonation switch, no less)... they survive. The school expels them! This entire scenario feels like a stand-up comedy bit. There is absolutely no way in hell that those three could have survived the explosion; they were right in the middle of ground zero. No scientific explanation or Talent is gonna get you out of that... and yet the school's response is to expel them for being responsible for the bomb threat? Even if this was a setup to get these three characters into place for the Future Arc (which is exactly what happened, apparently the vague Future Foundation or whatever recruits them)... I highly doubt the person that makes a bomb threat would put themselves right in the middle of where the bomb was going to go off unless they were completely deranged and unhinged. Only Seiko seems somewhat mentally ill - the other two appear to be completely fine. What a poor excuse on the school's part. Once again, DR3 is contrived - their survival and their expulsion are contrivances that exist solely to get them into place for (literal) future plot elements that have nothing to do with this particular arc.
The school merely suspends Komaeda, which is a fucking stupid move. Even if his talent is "too great to let go", they have a wide list of reasons to believe that he was the culprit behind the explosion (key among them being his presence at the scene of the crime). Komaeda is a danger to the school as a result of his actions. Kick him out, man. This entire situation makes the adults look like complete fucking clowns. Chisa is kicked out of 1-B and transferred to the Reserve Course as a result of negligence, a move that I think came way too early. We're just now getting used to her as the teacher of her talented class, and now she has to spend precious screentime away from her students? This entire situation just feels off, man - none of the consequences actually feel right, practically or narratively. It makes "Komaeda" come off as a somewhat unfocused, uneven experience that was more concerned with where it wanted to end up than the quality of the events leading up to that end. It's a "big picture" obsession gone wrong.
I will say this - at least Episode 4 feels more like Danganronpa than the last episode did. There aren't any stupid bouts of tonal disparity, there's some actual violence for once (albeit strange violence that doesn't end in murder for some unfathomable, illogical reason), and it feels like the story is actually trying to go somewhere bigger for once instead of being stuck in the moment. Episode 4 is still unsatisfying in many ways - Izayoi, Ruruka, and Seiko are completely written out of the plot of the Despair Arc after this, and Komaeda's motivations in this episode come off as petty and aimless, which is at odds with what both the show and games want me to believe about him. Komaeda gives a speech this episode about how humanity is divided into two different groups at birth, but I feel like his words have no place in an episode where he was largely focused on making his classmates have to shit so badly they couldn't take their practical exams (I think).
Ruruka and Izayoi are pretty whatever characters - they ride the coattails of this episode's conflict and have no merit or value outside of it this season, but at least their strong designs and larger-than-life personalities fit far better than Sato and Natsumi's unfocused and shallow bitchiness. Seiko is almost a decent character, suffering from the same problem that her friends do (being shunted into irrelevance) - we're actually given a decent amount of time to care for her thanks to her interactions with both Komaeda and Ruruka, which made me a lot more invested in her than I did Sato or Natsumi. And they were the ones that died. Her nervous, shrinking-violet nature is familiar yet distinctive enough that it separates her from other, similar archetypes like Mikan - Mikan is more hyperactive and clumsy whereas Seiko is more fidgety and fragile. She's likable enough in the moment that it feels disappointing when the show decides it has no further use for her.
"Komaeda" is such a strange episode. It's so flimsy around the edges that you honestly start to wonder if there's a center to the action at all. Komaeda's actions throughout the episode lack a strong center - you feel like he's actually scheming for something deeper than just "I want to brighten my class's morale", but we're given no followup to this whatsoever. If the show is trying to establish him as a major player, it's not doing a particularly great job - he's too prone to the whims of fate around him. He's not truly independent enough to really define him as a 'big deal'. The climax to the bomb threat is all sorts of fucking messy - it feels like nobody responds how they should, and the fact that a school facility literally got blown up is pushed under the table. But then again, I guess by this point almost everyone had forgotten about Sato and Natsumi's deaths, so...
I don't know if I like "Komaeda" more than I do "A Farewell To All Futures" - it's more enjoyable and more true to Danganronpa's nature, but it has just as many major overarching problems and ends on a worse note. Couple that in with Chisa's leavetaking and 1-B's increasing irrelevance to the major narrative, and the feeling that DR3 is going nowhere fast starts to really sink in. We haven't quite hit the nadir of the show... but we creep closer and closer to it with every passing moment.
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