Now that Chitanda's queries about her uncle have been well and truly resolved, what next for the classics club? And why can Houtarou hear Chitanda arguing with a teacher in the next classroom? These two questions become inextricably linked as we reach episode six of Hyouka.
In fact, it seems to be rather an argumentative day all-round, as we soon encounter Ibara giving Fukube more than a mouthful of abuse on account of something he'd done in a non-stop tirade against him which only Oreki seems to know how to stop (despite Eru's best efforts). This leads into a discuss on how Chitanda manages to never get angry, before expanding into a wider discussion into the merits and otherwise of the seven deadly sins.
All of this serves as a reminder for Chitanda, as she first completely forgets why she was arguing with a teacher in class, before remembering what it was all about and relating it to her friends, allowing us to learn that her class' maths teacher had yelled at a number of pupils for not knowing the answer to an equation containing something they hadn't even learned yet thanks to an error on his part. But how did a teacher normally so meticulous in his preparations make such a basic mistake? It's this question which Chitanda demands an answer for from Houtarou - an answer which, of course, he delivers in due course.
Much as I feel like skipping over our usual discussion about how great this episode looks, it's actually rather hard to within an episode like this which relies so heavily upon it to drive an otherwise mundane storyline, spicing it up with interesting shots and visual cues together with some rather innovative ways of relating theories of descriptions of events to the viewer. Is this enough to get over the fact that we are, effectively, watching a twenty-minute episode about some mixing up of letters of the alphabet? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure - this episode was driven pretty well by its characters and their way of relating and thinking about things, so I enjoyed it enough for it to get a passing mark, but can we really carry on through another fifteen episodes of similar incidents? Looking at it from that angle, the series really needs something more substantial to nourish both itself and its viewers.