Medalist Season 2 ‒ Episode 9

© つるまいかだ・講談社／メダリスト製作委員会

This week's episode marks the final one of Medalist Season 2, though calling it a “finale” would be more than a little generous. What we have here is less of an ending and more of an advertisement for the upcoming movie, with nearly every second of its runtime being dedicated to that cause. Considering how slow the majority of the season has been, I'm not particularly shocked by this stunt, and while I'm sure it'll all work out for the movie, all that leaves TV viewers with is an underwhelming cliffhanger.

Before I ramble about that bit of disappointment, I might as well start by talking about the parts of the episode I did enjoy, even if they were mostly limited to the first half. It was nice to get introduced to Tsukasa's old skating club buddies Kohei and Junna, and the latter even provided the episode with some quality funny faces thanks to him using his status as a celebrity to act as theatrically as possible. I do kind of wish their presence was used to give us a little more insight into Tsukasa's past, but being around them and getting vastly different degrees of advice on incorporating the quadruple jump into Inori's next program does end up serving as a reminder to him that the only way for her to make it to the top is to take risks, so they do at least give us something of substance within the episode itself. The same can't quite be said for their student Miku, who gets a solid introduction as someone who acts like a big sister to the kids at her skating club, but not much beyond that as her plight of no longer being able to skate if their club can't get any new members is pretty clearly here to set the stakes for her role in the All-Japan competition. It's hard to get all that invested in her story when we're already at the end of the season.

Those are about all the positives I have for this episode, as the rest is dedicated purely to checking in on the other skaters before the All-Japan competition kicks off, and it's pretty dull. I suppose it was good to see Ema again, but it doesn't really amount to much as she only shows up long enough for us to learn that she failed to make the cut. It's an effective way of showing how fierce the competition will be, but it's also not exactly the most ideal one for checking in on a character we haven't seen all season, and a couple of the other returning faces get even shorter cameos than that. The episode does find the time to introduce a skating coach that looks like a fox girl, but seeing as that's all we learn about her, it just comes off like the show telling viewers to go see the movie, and that same feeling stretches across the rest of it. About the only significant moment here is in the final minute of the episode where we see Inori and Hikaru exchange a friendly greeting before the competition starts, but rather than helping to hype up their rivalry, it just kind of makes the scene from a few episodes ago where Hikaru didn't say anything to Inori during their training look all the stranger, which isn't exactly a great note for the season to close out on.

We've known from the beginning that this season was being made shorter in favor of doing the next arc as a movie, but I was holding out hope that it would feel self-contained enough as to not have that choice negatively affect the show itself, and thus didn't want to judge the decision too harshly until we saw how the season wrapped up. Now that it has, I can confidently say that this season feels incomplete and structuring it this way makes the shortcomings of the last few episodes all the more frustrating. Admittedly, a lot of this would be a lot less aggravating if I felt confident that the movie was going to some form of an international release, but between there being no established track record for Disney handling franchise films of their anime licenses, and their frankly abysmal treatment of those licenses in general, there's an uncomfortably strong possibility that the movie might not see a release outside Japan at all (a prospect that isn't helped by the fact that Disney's treatment of the second season hasn't done wonders for its visibility). Having that bit of potential doom looming over the horizon makes it a lot harder to reconcile with the incomplete nature of the second season, and that incompleteness ultimately makes it a step down from the first. The second season of Medalist had its moments, but after seeing the first season turn in a gold medal performance, it hurts to see this one barely make it onto the podium.

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Medalist Season 2 is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.