Review: Assassination Classroom “Baseball Time”

A feel good episode veiled in baseball and death? No, it can’t be!

This week on Assassination Classroom, we get a really weird episode in “Baseball Time,” that is meant to be a feel good episode. Now, you have to take this with a grain of salt, because feel good episode in Assassination Classroom is a bit of a misnomer. Everything is funny and sarcastic, there really isn’t a moment where a character is feeling down. And when he does, he just turns it around and feels better within five minutes. So, yeah, it’s still Assassination Classroom.

Now, that isn’t a terrible thing, considering that the episode went deeper as to why class 3-E was segregated so far away from the rest of the school, and why the rest of the school wanted nothing to do with it. When you mark a group as undesirable, the rest of society does not want to be around them for fear of becoming them. Just like Karasuma says, it’s social engineering at its greatest. What else is hidden in “Baseball Time” is how deep the creator Yūsei Matsui goes when we go deep into why 3-E is the class chosen.

Sonny Strait is still turning in a great performance as Kuro-Sensei, but the focus is less on him this week, and more on the students, namely Nagisa and Tomohito Sugino (who wants to be a baseball player), So, how else is this kid going to try and kill Kuro-Sensei? With a bunch of those BB’s that only hurt Kuro-Sensei, of course. Speaking of Nagisa, he is also coming into his own. In “Assassination Time,” he was a timid person who would just follow the school bully, he becomes a sarcastic kid with a cerebral take on how to take down Kuro-Sensei.

What makes things more intriguing is how they are making Kuro-Sensei seem human and wanting to help. He accidentally takes the tulips the students were growing, and replants new bulbs because he screwed up. Whoops…? The writers make no bones to keep pointing out how Kuro-Sensei can blow the shit out of the Earth at any moment, yet he wants to spend time helping these kids be better people and give them a chance to kill him. Kuro Sensei is a really dynamic character, and I think he can go far.

I think I said it last time, but Assassination Classroom can be a real breakout of the new DubbleTalk block. This show is so out there, it can find a niche with any type of fan. “Baseball Time” expands the story started in “Assassination Time,” yet still feels fresh moving forward and explaining more moving parts outside of the 3-E classroom. I have a feeling that this is going to be the norm going forward.