Bocchi the Rock!

Episode 11

It's the final countdown. The calm before the storm. The penultimate peril before we at last witness Kessoku Band in front of a crowd with triple digits. And it's our one last chance to see these characters goof around at all the typical school festival landmarks before we say goodbye next week.

It's a build-up episode, is what I'm saying, and while it's a solidly funny episode on its own, you can't quite get away from the feeling that this is meant to be a teaser for the finale. Which is fine—lots of good albums start with an intro meant to whet the appetite for what's to come, but it means there's not a ton to pick apart here. Like sure, it's funny and kind of touching that Kita has observed Bocchi enough to track her down when she's fleeing from attention. Same goes for how Bocchi is so terrified of regular interaction that a haunted house can't budge her needle. There's even some imagined bikini-service for the weirdos who have been obsessed over Bocchi's chest size for reasons that still escape me.

What I appreciate is the return of Bocchi's wide range of visual styles for its gags. There's of course Kita's edutainment segment on the natural habitat of wild Bocchis, and the already viral moment where Bocchi regresses into a blender asset and T-poses to assert her submission. But my personal favorite is the totally unexplained Mad Max bros who show up out of nowhere for what seems like a one-off joke, only to stick around in the background for the rest of the time in the classroom. It's totally out of nowhere, but the sheer disparity between how they're drawn and everything else in the show really sells the joke.

Otherwise though, this is all about building up to the performance. And it speaks to how attached I've become to these characters that I was getting just as nervous with each passing minute, jumping to conclusions about how things might go wrong at the last second. Is Kita's heavy breathing at the end of practice meant to show how hard she's going for it, or foreshadowing that she's going to get sick in the middle of the set? Is that mention of how old Bocchi's guitar is a portent of doom, promising that it'll malfunction mid-song? Has a lifetime of contrived conflicts in other media like this left me jumping at shadows? Who's to say. The point is I was genuinely apprehensive about the band's show until they were up on stage, being greeted by fans and friends alike, and then I yelled angrily at my screen when they cut to credits the second before the show was going to start. So they got me. I need the next episode like I've been needing a new Zatopeks record for nearly a decade. Give it to me.

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Bocchi the Rock! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.