Free! Eternal Summer Episode 4--Stop Me If You've Heard This One

We go into flashback mode to cover Sousuke's past only to find a story that feels very familiar...


So, in summary, Sousuke's main problem is that after an argument with his childhood swimming friend, he became jaded about swimming, thinking that he needed to cut himself off from the idea of friendship entirely in order to accomplish his goals. However, he's secretly harbored a desire to swim a relay with that childhood friend again after all these years... And where have I heard this plotline before?


I have to admit, I'm pretty disappointed that Sousuke's backstory episode reuses almost every beat from last season's drama with Rin. It is easier to take in one episode rather than having the show draw it out to a point where he's acting like a jerk for no reason. However, the similarities to Rin's story are so obvious that it makes me wonder if KyoAni recycled it because of the production schedule. How long did they have to work on the story before they needed to start animating and recording so that the show would come out on time?

 
There's also a lot of retconning going on in this episode in order to fit Sousuke into the show's timeline. Since he wasn't around in the first volume of High Speed (although I've heard that he'll be in the second one), now we've got flashbacks of Rin talking about him to Haru, Makoto, and Nagisa, and then a kind of handwavy "he stopped writing" explanation for why they didn't communicate after Rin went to Australia. Sousuke's not exactly a clone of Rin, yet from the first episode the show has made a lot of parallels between the two of them, from his introduction to his declaration of wanting to swim in a relay again.


But while the loner angst and the "I don't need friends to win" attitude are complete retreads, Sousuke does have some differences in his motivation. Last season, Rin was trying to run away from his past by proxy of defeating Haru in a race, while Sousuke seems to want to recapture a moment that is now beyond his reach. Rin clearly means a lot to him, and those sad faces that he pulls whenever Rin mentions Haru and Co. and how inspirational they are to him makes me think that Sousuke has some regrets about the choices he made as a kid. I think that he wanted to be the person that Rin leaned on, but that isn't the case. Sousuke seems to be making the slow realization that he doesn't mean as much to Rin as Rin does to him, despite the fact that they're good friends.

And why is that, exactly? They seem to get along well enough, so why couldn't they work together in a relay? Any kind of argument they could've had couldn't have been that bad--

Oh.

Well then. That's hitting below the belt. The episode doesn't spell it out, but I think that this is the cause of the rift between them. They were friendly when Rin left for Australia, but considering how much Rin's dad had an impact on his life--he's the entire reason he started swimming, after all--I don't think any friendship could fully recover from that. We don't know what Sousuke said, but it can't have been anything good.

The dream team

However, if Sousuke is looking for a roundabout way to patch things up and still swim a rely with Rin, he came in at the right time. As I've said in pretty much every post for this season so far, Rin has grown and doesn't hold grudges based on his past anymore. He wants to build his own team and forge his own way forward, and this time he wants to do it without sacrificing his friends. Whether or not Sousuke thinks that's the best mindset to have competitively is irrelevant; Rin wants it all, and I think that he'll be able to get it!

Meanwhile, the Iwatobi Swim team is re-enacting Lucky Star

One last nitpick before I end this post: so much focus is being placed on who will be on the Samezuka relay team, but it's already a given what the roster will be. We haven't introduced any rivals, and even if there were, Rin cut down on the competition with his announcement at the end of the episode that the spots wouldn't be determined by times alone. I guess I'm just confused as to why this show is treating it with so much gravity when the result is obvious. In real life this would be a much bigger concern, but this way it feels like the show is adding drama just because it can. And you know a show's not doing its job at being sheer entertainment when you're getting distracted by the silly flaws rather than just enjoying yourself.

Anyway, looks like next time is the Nagisa episode! And now I'm worried again about the serious faces they're wearing in the preview...

I think you can all figure out the joke here

Images from Crunchyroll.com.