Baby Steps Episode 5
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)
Baby Steps pushed Eiichiro in some good ways the last time around as he went through his challenge with Takuma and it helped to show him that he’s nowhere near as good as he thought he was getting. But it did reveal that he is a very quick learner and one that can break down the mechanics of an opponent that would make him a real asset to any team. That also got Natsu to realize there’s even more to him than she thought there might be and that’s drawn her just a touch closer to him. Eiichiro has done well so far to be sure considering how recently he became a part of it and it’s fun to see that he is still struggling in some ways with just the physical exertion side of it all. But we also now have him getting ready for the first match of his first tournament, which has him going up against a seeded player. And that means he’s going to get taken down pretty quickly since he has the potential but nowhere near the skill or ability to really manage against him. At least that’s how it would work i the real world for the most part.
With Ryo Oobayashi as his opponent, Eiichiro is obviously excited to go up against his first opponent, though you expect that he’s done more one on one training at the facility in the four months since he joined rather than this being his true first. With the potential for some less than pleasant weather, he and Ryo end up having their match moved up since both arrive early in order to get things moving. Ryo isn’t a bad guy from first appearances, though he is serious, but he definitely views Eiichiro as nothing more than a warmup and certainly not a threat. With Natsu and the others arriving early themselves, this gives everyone the usual team camaraderie moments as well as doing the bit of exposition about how tournaments work, which is certainly easy to gloss over if you’ve watched any amount of sports shows over the years. It handles it well and without being overbearing but it does the usual routine in the end. It doesn’t help settle Eiichiro’s nervousness though as his match is called to start, but that’s what Takuma is for with his particular style of “encouragement.”
What becomes really great though is that as the match starts and we see Eiichiro panic by overthinking what he has to do, his body sort of takes over for him with a return to Ryo’s serve that simply surprises everyone as nobody expected anything from him. While Ryo is wondering if he just underserved him and wasn’t putting in full effort, news starts to spread that he’s facing a decent challenge now and that draws a bit of a crowd and certainly plenty of commentary, especially about how the game works since it’s our first tournament. With no real experience though, Eiichiro is able to do only so much and his weaknesses are comically exposed quickly, which could turn the match into a joke. The ups and downs of the match play out decently here considering how new Eiichiro is and that’s with going up against the skill of a fifth seeded player. Eiichiro is also learning that what happens in practice doesn’t translate well here to an actual match and he’s being pushed in a pretty hard way for a first timer as the challenges rise up before him to stay in the competition.
In Summary:
Baby Steps is certainly taking baby steps here to get Eiichiro in the game and he’s facing the struggles of any truly new player would deal with in such situations. His struggle is the basis of the episode here as he goes up against the better skilled Ryo, but I like the show for what it didn’t do rather than what it did, which was fine. I liked the Ryo wasn’t some overbearing character or something out of the ordinary in design but rather a normal, dedicated and skilled opponent that befits a fifth seeded player. He’s thrown off by the start of the match but puts it all in from there as he tries to understand the oddness that is Eiichiro, who himself is struggling with what a real tournament match is like with all the additional onlookers and what it represents. It’s definitely well done overall, but it also lacks a certain oomph to truly make it exciting like you get in some other series since it is try to treat it realistically.
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.