Baby Steps Episode 4
What They Say:
Baby Steps centers on a honor student named Eiichiro Maruo who becomes frustrated with his life and decides to join the tennis club. Despite lacking experience and physical strength, he utilizes his studious nature to develop a strategic approach to playing tennis. Taking notes of his opponents’ habits and tendencies, he is able to predict their next move before they even react. He also meets Natsu Takasaki, a beautiful girl with a passion for tennis. With her help, he aims to become a professional tennis player.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
When certain personality types get into something, sports or anything else, they go at it in a way that “normal” people just can’t seem to understand. While the naturally gifted work hard at it, the obsessive types that want to understand it and master it – for whatever reason – throw themselves into it in a very technical way sometimes, which we saw with Eiichiro has done with his pages of notes that really surprised Natsu. She’s grown up playing tennis and has a long and natural understanding of the mechanics of the game, but he approaches it in this way that works for him and explores a different method that really makes an impact on her. Not that it would work for her, per se, but it shows to her that he has such a way about him that he’s truly taking it seriously.
Of course, all of that doesn’t truly prepare him for an opponent yet, which we see here as his challenge to Takuma is accepted. While he’s ready to go against him, he’s pretty fearful from the get go because what he saw of Takuma before was him warming up and not the real thing. Which is far more powerful, to the point where it shakes his confidence. It’s fun to watch as he does his best to even hold his own, but he’s simply outclassed across the board as one might expect. But it’s how he handles it that’s amusing as between serves he checks his notes and adds more information to it. The first half works through this well as Eiichiro never gets a hit across but learns a lot along the way. Its instructional for both, though Takuma is just tired of the whole thing and walks away without giving the punch that was involved. What’s intriguing though is that as the match went on, the coach got to see what Eiichiro was up to in his notebook and it showed how Takuma was becoming frustrated with the whole thing. Eiichiro’s method has so much informational potential that it could change things in a big way.
With this encouraging the coach to get Eiichiro to move forward to his first real match in an upcoming competition a month away, the training phase begins anew as he’s nervous and worried but does everything he can to try and learn so he can participate well in it. With the bracket set, he learns that his opponent is a solid player named Oobayashi that was seeded previously and is one of the best in the tournament, which makes Eiichiro an easy target. There isn’t exactly a montage sequence here for training, but we get some good pushes forward and the month that exists between news and the start of it works nicely as we see how Eiichiro pushes forward and does his best while being wildly nervous about it, which is to be expected of just about anyone, but especially him with his nature. It’s good that we get a bit of lead-up time to it with the training but that it’s not beaten over our heads as well.
In Summary:
Baby Steps shows us the way that Eiichiro can go forward with this episode and hold his own if he builds up enough skill and confidence. Through his challenge to Takuma, he starts to understand what a real power player is like and begins to process that in the way he does with information, which certainly makes an impression on the coach. But we also see that what he’s learning is making an impact on Takuma as well as there’s that careful edge of frustration and distaste over it. Combining those moments with a little Natsu encouragement and the shift towards the first match offers a lot of movement in the episode. Eiichiro’s still a hard character to really connect with, but he’s an easy one to root for and the show is giving it to us in small and realistic tastes that definitely makes it fun to watch.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.