Previously on Beyond the Boundary:

Although Mirai defeated the Hollow Shadow, everyone felt the backlash of what happened the next day. Seeking to feel something other than loneliness, the kids go relieve their stress at the lantern festival. Spoilers Ahead!

Things have gotten back to what is considered normal for the literary club. Having gotten her license back, Mirai learns of an extremely valuable and extremely hard to kill youmu that happens to live on the roof of the school. Failing to capture it the first time, Mirai continues to try her hand but comes up short. Finally enlisting the help of Akihito and the others, Mirai realizes that she’ll need a little star power to catch this youmu.

Taking a bit of detour from the heavy stuff, this episode of Beyond the Boundary is a lot of fun with a decent twist.

The club is getting along well with the addition of Mirai and we do learn that she likes bonsai (which is an expansion on her gardening hobby from the previous episode). It also balances out since Mitsuki has another girl to help her survive the combined idiocy radiating from Hiromi & Akihito. They also get another temporary addition to the group in the form of Ai, who helps them as they try to capture the youmu.

Speaking of the youmu itself it is indeed the weirdest one yet. Its a fruit type and according to Ayaka (who explains this to Mirai during her model shoot while Akihito asks how much the photos cost), extremely hard to pin down. Suffice to say Mirai runs off before getting the full story and she and Akihito are drenched in a strange-smelling liquid. After Mirai & Akihito rope Mitsuki into helping, Ai tells them of the youmu’s attraction to young girls and Mirai poses (literally) as a distraction while tries a sneak attack. This fails and Mitsuki is marked in a pink liquid more horrendous than the yellow one.

When they wrangle Hiromi into their mission they learn of the monster’s other weakness…the overwhelming power of J-Pop! The youmu is quite fond of a certain song and it is up to Mirai & Mitsuki to sing it, trouble is Mirai is a terrible singer and the team once again gets drenched for their troubles. This leads to the foursome pulling out all the stops and training hard to take down the youmu.

This is where the episode really shines, the episode itself takes place over the course of about 3-4 weeks with the literary club attemtping to beat the youmu on Sundays. Seeing how Sunday is the really important day we don’t really concern ourselves with the previous days. A lot of the development of the episodes happen in the showers of the school, since after every failed attempt the group has to clean themselves off. Here is where we see them click more as they resolve to beat the youmu (if only because they don’t want to stink anymore). This leads to montage of them learning how to dance and sing, which has some funny, triumphant, and dramatc moments in it. They perfect the song (Ai even joining in at the end), but they focused on the song so much…they forgot to figure out who was going to kill the youmu.

“Shocking Pink” is a filler episode, but it is an entertaining one. The groups repeated fail attempts against the youmu are hilarious and there are actualy some dramatic moments as their losses start to get to them. The montage was well paced and the overall gelling and growth of the literary club was good. Also it was nice to see Ai do more. Life continues next week when Mirai confronts Sakura one more time.

 4/5