Occult Academy episode 3

I’m a bit unsure on how to review this epis­ode. Part of it was taken up with Maya try­ing des­per­ately to advance the plot but with nobody else seem­ingly pay­ing atten­tion to it, most not­ably her sidekick Uchida spend­ing the epis­ode flirt­ing with the cute wait­ress. There were some witty parts in there but it was mainly pretty dumb stuff. Guy likes boobs. Girl is moe. Guy likes it whenever girl touches guy. A lack of this shows poster girl, Maya, really didn’t help either. How­ever there’s some­thing going on with all this that makes actu­ally being harsh on this epis­ode dif­fi­cult and it all depends on whether the stuff I’m read­ing into is true or not. Basic­ally, is this show as smart as I think it is?

First of all, as soon as this girl entered, I was abso­lutely con­vinced that it was his mum. It hit me instantly that it was the case, although there’s not a whole lot of evid­ence to back that up. The big fact in favour of this the­ory is that she called the kid on TV ‘Fumiaki’, which Uchida him­self says only his mum calls him that. How­ever everything else is against this the­ory of mine. For one, he called his mum barely a minute before he went into the res­taur­ant and his younger self was in the back­ground so this girl couldn’t be him. Also they don’t sound or look the same at all.

Why was I so con­vinced that she was her mum any­way? I had loads of the­or­ies as to what was going on here but the more I think of it, the less likely they are. Humph, well I put lots of thought into them so I’m going to have to wrap my ideas around this latest realisation.

So the mum couldn’t be in two places at once, right? So this per­son clearly isn’t his mum, but one of those tengu doing some shape-shifting or some­thing along those lines. They’ve shaped them­selves into some­thing that would appeal to Uchida. Wait, that makes more sense than I real­ised. He did say that she was ‘exactly his type’ right? So obvi­ously the tengu shape-shifting thing has altered itself to appeal exactly to Uchida. She called him Fumiaki because it was what he was des­per­ately hop­ing at that time. He was feel­ing extremely depressed after call­ing his mum and wanted someone who could under­stand him. Then right at that moment a hot girl calls the kid on the TV Fumiaki? Something’s fishy here…

Right, time to push this the­ory fur­ther. The old lady in the res­taur­ant wasn’t a sis­ter. That was a rather lame lie on its part. It was the tengu simply tak­ing shape of the latest per­son he’d seen. The tengu then turned into the women of his dreams, which is what took her so long to deliver the food. What breaks this idea down though is that the old women called for the moe girl to come back to the kit­chen, but the old lady wasn’t in sight when she said that so it could be pos­sible for a tengu to pro­ject a dis­em­bod­ied voice or some­thing like that.
Push­ing this the­ory even fur­ther, because I’m like a dog that won’t let go of a ten­nis ball. If you want to get this the­ory off me you’ll end up with your hand covered in my saliva…hmmm, maybe I pushed that meta­phor too far.

Any­way, that curry place isn’t real. Notice how there’s never any­one else in there, or how he only noticed the place after he made the phone call. A sign it’s a cre­ation by these Tengu things? Or how about the fact that when he left the place the first time, there was a tengu watch­ing him. Admit­tedly this the­ory doesn’t quite stretch that well. For one, he’s still quite obvi­ously eat­ing curry, so I guess Ten­gus must be cap­able chefs as well as poten­tial ali­ens. Then there’s the fact the girl had a car. Although now that I think about it, didn’t Uchida say that this was the car of his dreams? Girl of his dreams + car of his dreams? Although you’d think if it was the car of his dreams then he’d know how to use the seat belts. I guess the Tengu spent too much time watch­ing Top Gear.

One idea that crossed my mind was that maybe moe girl was only vis­ible to him, but Maya saw them together in the cave. She didn’t make any ref­er­ences to him being with a girl, but I doubt that, if she saw him bab­bling away to him­self under­ground, that she would leave him be and hide behind a rock. But almost while she was down there she got attacked by Tengu. Sus­pi­cious me thinks.

This will be my face if not one of these the­or­ies are even remotely close to the truth. If that epis­ode was genuinly just Uchida meet­ing some girl in a rest­eraunt and going on a date with her then I shall be extremely dis­s­a­poin­ted. If she’s noth­ing more than an ordin­ary girl who will only show up into the plot to add some extra love interest then this epis­ode was crap and so is her char­ac­ter. I have faith in you Occult Academy. You’ve shown that you’re clever with your humour and your script. Show me now that you’re also clever with your plot.