Review of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2009)

Everyone always complains about the Endless Eight arc and how it's the most boring arc, in my opinion the episodes that follow Endless Eight are more boring. I think a lot people miss the risk taken with Endless Eight and the emotions that the arc holds. With most stories that hold an arc about a time loop it is often that the writers will skip over the multiple failed attempts made by the protags until they reach the good outcome, but Endless Eight shows multiple time repeats instead of just saying that they happened and showing Kyon getting the good ending. Endless Eight is emotionallyheavy as well, where Kyon and Koizumi can't remember living through the other repeats they are not very hurt by the events of the repetition, but Nagato is conscious during the entirety of over 15.500 time loops. Through the episodes Kyon breifly mentions that Nagato looks bored, but Nagato is feeling more complex emotions. Nagato relives these two week countless times becoming helpless in the knowledge that she is alone, that none of what is happening is real and nothing she says will be remembered by the next time loop.

It is a continuous theme that Nagato is lonely, Kyon brings it up when Nagato says that she was brought into existence three years prior to the events of the anime and she has just waited for the time to come. Nagato may be an alien but she feels like everyone else.

The arts festival events and the episodes about the movie are boring and filler like in style. It felt like the writers ran out of things after the first season but were given a second so they had to fill in the slots. It does give Nagato a bit of characterization and problems do arise, but it doesn't really bring anything interesting to the table.