Haruhi season 2 episode 2: Endless Eight (part 1?)

I just finished watching the new Haruhi episode via live stream and, I’m sure most of us will agree, it ended quite contrary to what was expected…

Before I get to the actual ending of the episode, I’ll first review the rest of it. KyoAni did a great job with including all of the summer vacation activities that the SOS Brigade participated in from the novels (if you recall, we saw Mikuru’s frog costume hanging in the club room in some episodes of season 1 ^^) A few little minor scenes were left out, such as Haruhi and Yuki riding with Kyon on his bike and Haruhi and Mikuru falling asleep during the star-gazing scene, but nothing major. Although some of the activities were a little rushed, if I recall correctly, I don’t think any of them were left out. Oh, and the new opening is a lot of fun too =)

I was thoroughly enjoying the episode until the ending. It was expected that “Endless Eight” would only be one episode but it’s possible now that it’s either going to be two episodes, or else it’s been significantly changed from the novels. For those of us who have read the light novels, or who are at least familiar with the story, know why the ending was kind of shocking…

The episode was practically the same as the “Endless Eight” story from the novels except for the ending. Originally Haruhi, not wanting summer to end, makes the last two weeks of vacation repeat endlessly (15,498 times to be exact). Yuki was the only one aware of this from the beginning until the other SOS Brigade members finally realize it. With each repetition, there were some variations among the activities they did, but it was pretty much the same each time. Kyon was able to stop the cycle by suggesting the one fulfilling event they need – doing summer homework together.

But as we can see in the episode, Kyon seems to have done his summer homework himself and nothing about the repeating days is brought up.

———

My speculations about the unexpected turn of events in this episode; on the bright side, maybe Kyon didn’t finish all of his homework, and KyoAni might have simply decided to make the “Endless Eight” story expand beyond one episode. Next episode might be “Endless Eight part 2,” though I don’t see how there would be enough material left in the story to fill another whole episode (and wouldn’t they have taken their time with all the summer activities in this episode if that was the case?) Another thought is that they might just throw the last part of “Endless Eight” in at the beginning of the next story, “The Sigh.” Either way, this would change everyone’s idea of what the episode numbers and scheduling of Haruhi S2 would be. The worst scenario would be that KyoAni has decided to completely change “Endless Eight,” leaving it with the ending we saw in this episode, and just moving on to “The Sigh” next week. I’m gonna try to be hopeful but if they really did decide to turn “Endless Eight” into a blatant filler episode and completely ignore the original, and interesting, underlying plot that was in the novels, I’m going to be very mad >_< I can't see any reason why they would do this so we'll just have to wait and see. Perhaps they just wanted to get us riled up so we'll be all the more excited next week. ::sigh:: Will they ever let us Haruhi fans relax? XD UPDATE: A new and more plausible speculation: the next episode will be a near repeat of this episode but with variations on the summer activities. Since this episode ended with Kyon doing his homework himself and thus not doing what was necessary to end the cycle, it would naturally be repeated again. Pretty clever of KyoAni to do it this way =P Of course, fans who are not familiar with the novels will probably be very confused until they get to the conclusion of the story. To get the real feel of it, we should watch this episode 15,498 times XD