The Endless Eight

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is awesome. I said so myself a little while back after purchasing the first season on DVD. I also said I couldn’t wait for more. Well thanks to the wonders of subtitles and the internet I have been able to stream the episodes of the second season online way before they’re likely to make a western, PAL region appearance. To be honest I wasn’t thinking I would do another post on TMOHS; it’s still the same show, it’s still really good and it still stirs all sorts of dormant emotions in me. But then came the Endless Eight.

The Endless Eight is something of a miniseries within the series with the concept that the characters in the show have been unaware of the fact that the same three weeks or so have been replaying themselves over and over. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, so I’ll leave it at that. But what I found really interesting and indeed conflicting about this concept was that it meant seeing what was essentially the same episode eight times. There were some very subtle differences to the dialogue and the costumes as well as some big differences in presentation and tone at times but essentially I felt this was too little. The reason I’m conflicted about this is because it was definitely a bold creative decision to present the plot in this way and it certainly affects the viewer. It was definitely used to immerse the watcher in the cyclic hopelessness of the situation and there were times I really felt it, screaming at the oblivious characters to act differently and break the hideous loop. You can’t deny that you get the same sense of being trapped that the characters feel but ultimately I also think it was too much. It was clever, it was bold and it had a tremendous impact on me. But I felt it all would’ve been much more effective if it had been half as long. If it were four episodes long I would’ve had no doubts in my mind that this was a brilliant idea that took a whole lot of balls to execute.