At the beginning of the episode, we learn that Mitsumi is going to be the student council secretary for the next term. Takamine ran for student council president, but was beaten by a popular boy who was going to be captain of the soccer team until he was sidelined by an injury. Takamine is having a hard time accepting the loss, and it doesn’t help that the drama club president ended up rubbing salt into the wound without realizing it.

After Mitsumi explains the situation, the drama club president comes to the student council room and shows Takamine, Mitsumi, and Sousuke (who accompanied Mitsumi) a film he directed in the fifth grade, back when he dreamed of becoming a film director. Since he didn’t have friends, it was a one-man show. Even though he’s embarrassing himself by showing this to them, he’s doing it to make a point and to help Takamine laugh and lighten her feelings. I appreciated seeing the drama club president doing something like this, because up to this point, he’d been depicted as being more interested in himself and what he wanted than in thinking about others. This scene helped to humanize him a little more. Afterward, Takamine decides she needs to learn how to lighten up and relax a little. However, true to form, we see her trying to schedule the relaxation and breaks as much as she did her usual activities. Old habits die hard with her, it seems.

The second half sees the students getting ready for summer break and trying to come up with plans. We also see Sousuke being approached by several girls, hoping to either score his contact information or to ask him out. He shoots them all down, and Mitsumi feels conflicted about this. On the one hand, she’s glad that he’s shooting them down, but on the other, she feels for the girls. She feels for the girls because she realizes that if her situation had been different, she and Sousuke may have never become friends.

Mitsumi wants to go to the zoo before she goes back home to spend some of her summer break there, because she wants to get some panda souvenirs for Fumi. Sousuke thinks it’s going to be busy during break, but he later sees that weekdays during break actually won’t be that busy. Sousuke asks if she’s going to go with anybody, and we see in Mitsumi’s thoughts that she’s wished the two of them could go together. Unfortunately, she lets this slip out by asking if he wants to go with her. Mitsumi is horrified when she realizes what she asked, but after an awkward silence, Sousuke says he’s cool with that because he’s never seen a panda before.

Mika, who realizes she left something in the classroom, ends up overhearing this conversation. She decides not to go in and to get what she left behind the next day. When she heads outside, there’s a girl in a different school uniform, asking which class Sousuke is in. The girl comes across as rather stuck up, especially when she goes to the classroom and complains about how plain it looks. When Sousuke sees her, he hurriedly takes her out of the classroom. After they leave, Mika pulls out a magazine and shows the cover to Mitsumi. The girl on the cover is the same girl asking to see Sousuke. We’re now left with a mystery of how this girl knows Sousuke and why she wants to see him.

My guess is that Mitsumi is going to misunderstand the situation between Sousuke and this girl, and that this misunderstanding could affect how she interacts with Sousuke. It seems the story is trying to suggest that this girl, who appears to be a model, is a love interest for Sousuke in order to add some more tension to the story. This makes sense, though, since Mitsumi and Sousuke worked through their misunderstanding in the previous episode, so an element needs to be introduced in order to have tension for the story going forward. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

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