There was a scene in this episode that neatly illustrated why I’ve gotten so disillusioned with this series - Issho after Akane’s performance.

They show him rising up with that full angry look on his face, then sneering that Akane knows that she shouldn’t even be there, and she immediately agrees. Then that’s it - they end the scene and jump forward to backstage afterwards. We don’t get to see whatever that interaction was - we only get to hear a description of it later. And what’s the description? That he went on to tell Akane that a professional shouldn’t be disrupting a competition for amateurs.

So in spite of the full angry face and the sneering delivery, he went on to pay her an extremely high compliment.

So the full angry face was a fake-out. Why? Because they still have to pretend that the whole beginning of the story meant something because Akane hasn’t yet had the one-on-one confrontation with him that was the entire point in the beginning, so they still have to go through the motions of making Issho look like a villain just a little bit longer. But the reality is that they’re laying the groundwork for pretending that his full angry face all along was just a fake-out, including, most notably, when he summarily expelled everyone, including Akane’s dad, six years ago. Why? Because the whole idea that he was some sort of villain that Akane was going to confront - the whole driving force behind her decision to dedicate herself to rakugo - is going to end up being tossed aside.

And why didn’t they show the rest of the scene between Akane and Issho when she was on stage? Because it was stupid. It’s a stupid concept. There’s no way that they could’ve started with that entirely threatening intro, then shift to Issho calling her a professional competing against amateurs without it turning stupid some way or another. He’d look stupid making that switch, and she’d look stupid listening to it. AND then it would completely deflate the whole one-on-one that the entire series has been building up to. How could she go in there with a full head of steam to confront him over her dad getting expelled when he just paid her a ridiculously high compliment in the competition? She couldn’t. So they didn’t show the scene. They included it, because it was necessary for it to be there to retcon the entire narrative, but they couldn’t show it because it was too stupid - because this whole retcon is too forced and too stupid and they have no way of actually showing it in detail without revealing that fact.

And now what do we get? She goes in to confront him - the moment that the entire series was initially built toward - and when she asks her question, he stands up and smiles like a Disney princess meeting her beloved. Why? Obviously I can’t know, but it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s because that’s going to be the debut of the fully retconned Issho, and he’s going to vomit out a whole spiel about how much he loves rakugo and how desperately he wants it to continue, but that required making some hard choices and it hurt him to do it but he had to shake things up because that whole generation of rakugoka was too conservative and too timid and the craft needed new blood and now look - there’s Akane and smug guy and voice actress and they’re all wonderful and he loves them all so much and blah blah blah blah blah. And it’s going to be smarmy and repulsive.

And I have a further prediction beyond that - one way or another, she’s not going to be entirely taken in by his response, because there needs to be one more gross retcon scene.

Who haven’t we seen hardly at all in all of this? Akane’s dad. Why? Because they’re saving him for the penultimate scene, in which he tells Akane that Issho was right to expel him and he really shouldn’t have been trying to become a rakugoka and he’s better off now and she’s better than he would’ve ever been anyway and Issho’s right and she’s the future and blah blah blah blah blah.

And then the transition from an engaging tale of betrayal and determination and a quest for justice to an insipid Jump perpetual motion machine will be complete.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. There’s just been too much insipid garbage already (and especially that scene after Akane’s performance, or more precisely, the fake out introduction to the scene and then the after-the-fact capsule description of it) and I can’t see it leading anywhere else.