Haruhi Season 2: Episode 4 - Endless Eight (again, once again)
Maybe I should just keep this episode summary to a minimum, and a rant to an all time high, as this episode four is nothing more than a repeat of episode 3. Now I don’t know if this is a very smart way of putting in Haruhi filler episodes or a very, very bad way of storytelling >_>. Let’s get on with the summary:
Summary of Episode 4:
It’s the same as episode 3! Just imagine varying degrees of dialogue, different scene angles, and people wearing different clothing. That’s it. Oh, and the iteration has increased. /end summary
Not much different from episode at all. I had some hopes that this particular story arc will end so it can get on with what this season is supposed to be, which is the Disappearance of Haruhi. This story arc is the prelude to it. As important as it is, I am not liking the idea of the arc spanning so far a minimum of 4 episodes. I’m hoping episode 5 delivers something more than just another repeat of episodes 2, 3, and 4 all over again.
Episode 2 was a preview to what was ahead for this particular episode. For this ep, Kyon starts out the day to the same episode as episode 2. You aren’t immediately clued in to what’s going on until he receives a phone call from Haruhi asking him to meet up and to bring his bike, where he seemingly finds out (for the first time) to go to the public pool.
To the audience, it’s clear at this point that either Kyon and company are repeating the same sequence of events or the viewer has lost their mind thinking they’re watching the wrong episode. To alleviate that confusion, the show replays the sequence of events with different angles, minor character positionings, and slight variations in dialogue.
The episode pretty much repeats itself for the most part. The minor variations are the camera angles and Kyon’s nagging thoughts of how everything looked familiar, as if he’s done these activities before recently. The largest variation is the night after the Bon Festival where Mikuru discovers that she has lost connection to the future. Kyon meets up with her, Itsuki and Yuki, where Itsuki explains how they are stuck in an infinite loop between August 17th to the 31st, and that all memories are reset when the loop rewinds itself. Well, all memories except for Yuki, who actually transcends space-time altogether, remembered every iteration. Kyon asks her how many times have gone on already, whereby she reveals that their current iteration of this repeating timeline is the 15,498th iteration already, an equivalent to roughly 600 years’ worth of days.
After this news, Kyon has no choice but to go through all the activities Haruhi had planned out for them for the rest of the summer. By the second to last day after their list of activities are all completed, Haruhi is ready to wrap up their summer. Kyon feels a heavy presence around him as if he needs to say something before Haruhi heads home, otherwise things will repeat itself. Unfortunately, he draws blanks as he watches Haruhi exiting the diner and his hopes of restoring the future. That next day, his willingness to continue his dialy routines is completely gone, giving in to the inevitability that he will find himself erased of all memory and starting off again on August 17th.
I was rather disappointed in this episode’s finale. It basically means that Kyon realizes that he is an infinite loop. However, his realization will be erased by the next episode and he has to “rediscover” it all again, which means the next episode is going to be another goddamn repeat of this one! Things better get resolved next episode.