You know the episode is bound to be good when it starts off with a UFO abduction scene.
- In last week’s Silver Spoon, Hachiken, with the help of his classmates, organized a pizza festival which turned out unexpectedly successful.
- Summary of Silver Spoon Episode Five: Our protagonist, finally accustomed to horses, is riding along with the members of the Equestrian Club when they spot a crop circle in a nearby field. When he tells his classmates about it in the evening, they are surprisingly uninterested…until Nishikawa receives a mystic phone call confirming that something big is going down tonight at the fields called Area 51. He declares that he is going out to meet it, and they come up with a plan to escape unnoticed from the dormitory. Finally, five of them make their Great Escape, only to have their teammates be left behind one by one as they get parted by unexpected obstacles.
- My impressions: Continuing last week’s seemingly episodic format, where each episode can stand by its own, this time it’s mystery time! Although it wasn’t hard to guess the solution of the mystery, at least in hindsight, considering Nishikawa’s love for giant machines, I was thrown off by the plethora of UFO-related clichés like Area 51 and crop circles and whatnot. It is skillful writing from the staff behind the series when all questions posed during the episode are given a credible answer. I also liked how things unrelated even in the world of the show – the helicopters, the name of the field, the phone call – were combined just to throw off and entertain the audience.
- Although the complexity of the escape plan cannot even be compared to Prison Break, the plan was well thought out.
No, those are not cell numbers.
They even made a pretty elaborate floor plan of the building to help the viewers understand Nishikawa’s. It does help if you can read the kanji so it’s easier to follow their explanation of the plan and the hurdles they have to make it past.
War council in progress… under the bed sheets.
- Nishikawa took the spotlight in this episode, as Hachiken was mostly just a bystander and provided commentary on the silliness of their ways. This was a nice break from the previous episodes centering on him, and shows that the creators understand that in real life you can’t single out one person as the protagonist and make everyone else’s role just that of a supporter; something that some shounen series seem to often forget.
- The scenes where one by one the team members sacrificed themselves to get Nishikawa and Hachiken to meet the mysterious thing were pretty funny as well. The reason why I found them funny was that the team got done in by so mundane things, like Tokiwa’s pants ripping and Aikawa sidetracked by a strawberry thief, and so on. It fit nicely with the overall tone of the show.
Also random security guy defeated by a single baseball.
- What happened to Hachiken’s teacher who came to visit him at the end of the previous episode? I find it a bit puzzling that there was no mentioning him this time. The plot line concerning Hachiken’s family issues was also completely avoided this week. Maybe we will get more of it in next week’s episode, considering that summer break is coming up and presumably almost all students will go home to reunite with their families and help out with the family businesses, just like during Golden Week in episode three.
- All in all, a pretty entertaining episode, it combined hilarious scenes and tsukkomi-like comebacks with adventure and mystery rather skillfully.
