Welp, looks like it’s about time for another Week in Review. The spring season is pretty much just holding steady at the moment, with the action highlights and Galactic Heroes maintaining their usual appeal while Hinamatsuri trudges along the best it can. My schedule is turning out to be as light as I expected, and frankly, if I had some other well-written character drama to replace it, Hinamatsuri would be right out. That said, I’m not truly in any hurry to pick up more shows; this being a weak season also means I was able to find time for stuff like catching up on Violet Evergarden, which I’m very thankful for. Even if the actual airing shows disappoint, any season where I’m personally watching through productions like Princess Tutu and Chihayafuru can’t be that bad. But let’s put aside the paeans to backlog for now, and run down this week’s newest contenders!

This week’s Hinamatsuri felt like the show settling into what may become its default mode – a pretty solid comedy that can’t match the whirlwind tempo or consistently new jokes of the first few episodes, but still remains entertaining thanks to its sturdy fundamentals and likable characters. The first half, focused on Anzu’s attempts to find a TV to sell, typified this style while also offering many of the actual best gags of the episode. While I really enjoyed Hina’s deadpan journey to buy and sell a television, I felt Hitomi’s was a little more one-note, and that issue became more frustrating in the episode’s second half. “Hitomi is secretly a bartender, but all her friends think she’s secretly in a relationship with her teacher” simply isn’t that fresh or funny of a comic conceit, and though there were standout jokes here (new character Aizawa’s impressively expressive stone face, Hina always just sort of being there), the central gag couldn’t quite hold up. All in all, Hinamatsuri seems to be shaping up to a classic bubble show, likely to survive this season mostly because I don’t have anything to replace it.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes also felt very comfortable in its groove this week, though Galactic Heroes’ groove is more “methodical pacing and eloquent political drama masking fundamentally propulsive, hook-laden narrative fundamentals.” Galactic Heroes is one of the more sharply written shows out there, and sequences like this episode’s “I don’t hope for a permanent peace, I just want to see my son grow up in a world where he doesn’t have to join the military” are key to why it’s maintained such an enduring reputation. But beneath all that measured humanism and historical perspective, Galactic Heroes is also just a fundamentally engaging series of exciting military capers, with this week’s assault on Iserlohn essentially taking the shape of a traditional heist film.

I remember one commenter got a little annoyed when I compared Galactic Heroes’ appeal to that of Code Geass, but I didn’t mean that in a bad way – Galactic Heroes obviously has a far more self-serious aesthetic and more committed thematic goals, but it also understands that stories need to be enjoyable on a moment-to-moment basis, and it mines plenty of entertainment out of relying on the same dramatic structures you’d see in a movie like Ocean’s 11. My only real issue with the show is the same one I had with the first book – there are apparently a whole lot of stupid generals out there, meaning Yang and Rienhard’s ostensible brilliance still feels a lot more like they’re just the only reasonably smart people in the room. I’ll be interested in seeing how the show balances its immediate tactical drama and larger thematic certainties regarding the inevitability and stupidity of war once the tactics start taking up a greater portion of the drama.

The fiery training camp arc continued in this week’s My Hero Academia, which confidently executed on some of the most propulsive chapters of the manga so far. We didn’t get another absurd aesthetic highlight like last week, but that was expected – there are a lot of dramatic highs and exciting fights scattered throughout this arc, and a board-rearranging episode like this one was a fine place to hold back. Instead, we got a scattering of satisfying character moments from a wide variety of heroes this week, like Eraserhead comforting Tota and Bakugo arriving at an uneasy alliance with Todoroki. As for this episode’s focus fight, my only real complaint is that introducing a gun as an actual dramatic concern is just a bad idea for My Hero Academia.

Three quarters of the ostensibly “unbeatable” characters in this show could be taken out with one well-placed sniper bullet, but we suspend our understanding of that as long as the show itself doesn’t draw attention to it. By actually using a gun as a major dramatic variable, we are forced to directly acknowledge some of the creakier assumptions of this universe. On the other hand, the actual dramatic execution of Tetsu and Kendo’s battle was terrific, and made excellent use of the fog to create some menacing and effectively disorienting exchanges. I also liked the childish bitterness of their opponent, which offered one more unique perspective on why someone might join the League of Villains. The diversity of philosophies represented among Deku’s opponents is one of My Hero Academia’s more intriguing qualities, and I’m looking forward to the in-show discussions that will inevitably be raised once their viewpoints start gaining more traction.

Finally, this week’s Megalo Box felt like a bit of a monkey’s paw situation. In theory, this was precisely the episode I was hoping for – a more measured and introspective episode that took some time to flesh out Joe and his companions’ internal worlds, giving us the perspective necessary to more fully invest in their stories. In practice, this episode’s Nanbu-related drama often felt a bit like Nanbu and his former student repeatedly saying “I feel guilty” and “I feel angry” to each other, without any of the human texture or past context necessary for us to believe in those feelings. Megalo Box is always as on-the-nose as possible when it comes to its dramatic beats, and I see now that its fundamental nature may just not mesh with stories about human emotions.

That said, this episode was also beautifully directed, and many of the scenes that were trying less hard to be big emotional statements actually succeeded wonderfully as tiny human exchanges – like basically every Sachio scene, whose distance from the Nanbu drama actually made his scenes feel a lot more effortless and lived-in. On the whole, I’d say Megalo Box’s attempt to expand its emotional range resulted in some of its biggest dud scenes so far, but it also did ultimately set up a fight that’s far more loaded with dramatic weight than the battles so far. This wasn’t an entirely successful experiment, but I’m still happy Megalo Box went for it.