The Endless Eight

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is Fantastic. You may remember me praising it a little while back after purchasing the first season on DVD. I also said I would gladly pay 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 so that I don’t have to wait forever for the fucking PAL DVD to come out. I honestly wasn’t thinking I needed to 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 I saw the Endless Eight.

The Endless Eight is something of a miniseries within the series with the over-arcing story about the characters in the show being trapped in an endlessly repeating summer holidays, a predicament that only we, the viewer, are aware of most of the time. That’s really all you should know about the plot to understand my point, 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 eight episodes that were virtually the same with the exception of some very subtle differences to the dialogue and the costumes as well as some big differences in presentation and tone at times. Essentially I felt these changes were 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 makes an impact upon the viewer. There’s no denying it was 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 horrible loop. I can’t deny that I got the same sense of being trapped that the characters felt but ultimately I also think it was too much. It was clever, it was bold and it had a tremendous impact on me. But at eight episodes in length I wondered on several occasions just why they felt it had to be so damn long. If it were four episodes long as opposed to eight I would’ve had no complaints and no conflicted thoughts, but I guess I’ll just have to live with the choices they made.