This week’s episode takes a big leap back
We left off with Tatara and Chinatsu rising to D-class status after a second-place finish at an amateur competition in which Tatara secretly followed Chinatsu’s lead in the final heat. By questioning gender roles within ballroom dance in the past two episodes, the show took a couple of chasses forward. But this week’s episode takes a big leap back.
Tatara visits the Hyodo dance studio asking Marissa to clarify her mysterious statement from the competition. Though Marissa doesn’t expand on Tatara’s slyness, she demonstrates his passive leadership by having him pair with Kugimiya, who took first place with his partner in the amateur competition the day before. After Tatara struggles to swing his much taller partner, Kugimiya takes control and throws Tatara around like a mannequin on wheels. Marissa explains that not only should a male lead dance this way, and he needs to in order to win.
Marissa’s pragmatism answers last week’s cliffhanger: she isn’t buying Tatara’s style
Tatara and Chinatsu have already demonstrated that they work best with switched roles, but their second-place finish to Marissa’s students supports the coach’s emphasis on the male lead. It’s unclear whether Marissa actually supports her sport’s patriarchal scoring system, but by jutting Tatara back into an aggressive lead, she makes no effort at fighting it.
Her style differs from Sengoku’s, who discovered Tatara’s natural ability by allowing he and Chinatsu to switch roles when they first paired up. But spending the last month dancing on the international circuit has left Sengoku unable to coach his unorthodox but passionate student. When Sengoku returns to compete in Japan, Tatara informs him that he and Chinatsu will be taking lessons from Marissa now. It’s a bittersweet moment: Sengoku cracks a couple of jokes and wishes Tatara the best. Tatara also calls him “sensei” for the first time, and a flashback to Sengoku’s first lesson on posture frames Tatara’s growth under his teacher. Who knows if we’ll get to see Sengoku again.
Sengoku’s misogynist habits drag the series down
But it might be better if we don’t. Sengoku’s misogynist habits drag the show down, like when this week he asks Tatara “how far” he’s been with Chinatsu only two episodes removed from insinuating she liked girls (Tatara and Chinatsu being only 15 years old makes it even creepier). He also shares an odd moment with his competitive rival Trukhachev, who now flashes a pink aura and lecherously grabs Sengoku’s junk in lieu of a handshake, which Sengoku responds to by running away in panic. Either the creators of this show haven’t watched Yuri!!! on Ice or simply didn’t get its message: in a world as loudly feminine as ballroom dance, this portrayal of homosexuality just isn’t cool anymore.
The show won’t have much cool left anyway if Tatara and Chinatsu continue along this path with Marissa. From a narrative standpoint, Marissa remains the obvious antagonist, standing in the way of Tatara and Chinatsu’s true potential as a paradigm-shifting dance couple. But with all the normative behavior we get from Sengoku, Marissa, and even Tatara and Chinatsu themselves, it’s hard to tell if they’ll continue on the worthwhile path. Hyodo even offers to dance with Tatara at one point, willing to follow what he considers to be his rival’s intriguing lead. But just like everything else in the show so far, it seems like it was just a tease.
Episode 15 Review Grade: C
