Review of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

This anime has defeated me. As of watching the last episode (I haven't seen the film yet), I really cannot tell to what extend this anime has substance to back up the simulacra of effective avant-garde meaningfulness it presents. One thing's for sure, the show definitely functions a lot better as just one season (I should clarify I watched in air order). Due to the non-linear presentation order the show manages to have a clear development of intensities and concepts whilst also jumping around an incomplete narrative. The resulting combination is a very satisfying watch, and elevates what would otherwise be routine moments into instanceswhere you recognise a deeper emotional or intellectual significance. As a self-encapsulated thing then the first season is actually pretty good. The second season though, whilst not bad, just seems superfluous and unnecessary. Endless 8 may be very controversial, but the real problem with the season is that is can only play within the timeframe established by the first. We've already seen all the important points on that narrative curve, and so the resulting season can't possess that aforementioned quality that made the first season so good.

Like I said though, I cannot decide whether there's any real intellectual meat to the bones behind this - and it was Season 2 in particular that really made me confused here. In its concluding few episodes it seems to want to call into question certain fundamental notions of what has even been going on in the show for the entire runtime, but it just ends up, seemingly completely deliberately, descending into total nonsense (and you know it knows its doing it because it calls attention to it - the characters trying to work out 'how to show Haruhi her film is total nonsense' being one blatant example. But Is that really that interesting a thing to do? Is the show even doing that at all? Is it even thinking about the fact that it might accidentally be doing this kind of thing? At season 2's end, I had no idea of the answer to any of those questions, and as a result the show stands as something I can comfortably say I reasonably enjoyed, but feel somehow that I maybe shouldn't have (or maybe even I should have more).