Isekai Quartet

Episode 5

Episode 5 finally delivers the talent show that has been built up for the last couple of episodes. While it's not as riotously entertaining as I'd hoped, it still gets in plenty of decent jokes, including a couple that only viewers who are extremely familiar with one series or another are likely to get.

The most unexpected twist is that teachers aren't exempt from the random selection of participants, resulting in Rerugen getting caught off-guard by being selected first. He's a dutiful guy, so he's not going to shirk from this duty even while dying of embarrassment on the inside, which is not lost on the students; the funniest part isn't even that he's bad at singing his national anthem or that various characters take heart that they can't do anything worse, but that Darkness gets dreamy over experiencing that kind of embarrassment herself. Her own performance, where she virtually begs one of Tanya's upstanding underlings to literally whip her silly, spins the conversation off into condemnation for the underling because she implies that he always does this. It's a wonderfully ludicrous crossover between unexpected characters. I'm honestly not sure what Weiss' deal is though, as I don't remember anything from his series that could be connected to his "talent" or why Tanya would be flummoxed enough to cut him off.

Amongst other foolishness, the star scene is Megumin using her Explosion spell. Unsurprisingly, Ains is keenly interested, even though the target is a bronze statue of Pandora's Actor, a minion of the Great Tomb of Nazarick that he personally created. Ains wanting to follow that up with a display of his own wasn't surprising, but I was surprised that he used some kind of weather manipulation to create a snowfall. That was actually a neat touch, and the episode didn't waste the satisfaction of the moment by lacking in jokes, such as Megumin being helpless in the snow.(1) The other gag that requires deeper knowledge to get is Grantz's reaction to the snow(2), which was definitely worth a chuckle.

That may be the strongest aspect of this series: it doesn't miss any opportunities. The musical selection while it snowed and Ains' reasons for choosing snow were neat touches as well, especially since Overlord has never delved much into the background of Ains' player. This ending does leave the series without any clear direction forward, but I still look forward to seeing what it comes up with next.

1. Megumin depletes all her magical and physical energy after using Explosion, so she's completely helpless.
2. Tanya ran the recruits for her battalion through a winter hell in an effort to get them to drop out (so she could delay going back to war), but to her consternation, all of them bore through it and qualified. Ironically, it's one of the main reasons why her unit is so effective.

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Isekai Quartet is currently streaming on Funimation.