One of the best lessons I ever learned as a writer came from a class I took with my favorite writing professors in college, who regularly had us review whatever drafts we’d brought into class and cut them down by one-third. If we’d been instructed to produce a piece of around 2,000 words, for example, our first task before showing it to anybody else was to excise around 600 as quickly as possible. “Don’t think too hard about it,” he would say, “and don’t worry about messy transitions or missing details. That stuff isn’t important, and you can always go back and revise things later.” At first, this was a frustrating and often painful exercise, but it became easier as we continued. What always surprised me was how, more often than not, I would immediately single out some of my favorite pet passages as the first ones to go.

One time, I ended up throwing out the entire first two pages of an eight-page story that I’d slaved over for an entire week, and those opening pages contained some of the material that took me the longest to put together. All of those carefully wrought lines and meticulously planted narrative seeds were an important part of the process, certainly, but they didn’t ultimately need to be there for the piece to do its work. It was simply a better story after ridding it of some of my favorite bits.

I think Agents of the Four Seasons could stand to learn a lesson or two about the importance of killing its darlings. This is especially the case when it comes to the show’s constant use of flashbacks to the events that came before and just after Hinagiku’s abandonment and disappearance, which almost entirely dominate “A Place to Call Home.” The melodrama is firing on all cylinders in these sequences, with Sakura in particular spending much of the episode either furiously screaming or overcome with tears as she embraces her dear friend and laments everything they’ve lost because of the Spring Village’s choice to leave Hinagiku for dead.

It’s easy to suspect that these moments may have been some of the first and most powerful that author Kana Atsuki dreamt up Sakura and Hinagiku’s fraught relationship. Some images and emotional beats amongst them are honestly quite powerful, such as when Sakura tears her way through Hinagiku’s nest of thorns and brambles to embrace and comfort her. I mean, what a perfect visual metaphor that encapsulates exactly where both characters find themselves, am I right?

That’s exactly why I think almost all of this episode could (and should) have been nixed in the proverbial editing room. What makes “A Place to Call Home” so frustrating isn’t just that it’s opting to go into so much needless detail with all of these flashbacks; these flashbacks aren’t even showing us anything we haven’t already been well and truly beaten over the head with. There really is a benefit to sometimes rejecting the so-called “rules” of storytelling and settling for just telling your audience something instead of showing them every bump on the road that connects Point A to Point B. In a more chronologically linear telling of Agents of the Four Seasons story, I can see how an episode like this could have packed an emotional wallop, but the show’s insistence on sandwiching all of these flashbacks in between its incredibly lethargic present-day storyline has made most of the material we get this week feel exceedingly redundant.

“The Spring Village has been cruel and mercenary!” We get it. “Sakura was devastated when she lost Hinagiku!” We get it. “Hinagiku’s old self ‘died’ after being abandoned, which is why she has amnesia and talks funny now!” We get it. “The girls love each other oh so very much (but they’re totally, definitely not in love with each other, promise!),” I swear to you, Agents of the Four Seasons: We get it. We really do.

What kills me is that the opening of “A Place to Call Home” seems like it’s promising a look into the fragments of Hinagiku’s missing years that would be genuinely interesting and meaningful to explore. The creepy “Mother” who apparently held Hinagiku captive is not only the first whiff of a potentially interesting antagonist that we’ve been given all season, but learning more about her would, by definition, give us more crucial context about who these Insurgents are, what they want, and how exactly they plan to go about getting it. Instead, we get more scenes of Sakura crying about missing Hinagiku, and Hinagiku crying about missing Sakura, and both of them crying about “Hinagiku” not really being the Hinagiku she used to be, except for the inexplicable crush that this version of Hinagiku still has on the least interesting character in the whole show. Okay. Fine. Now, Agents of the Four Seasons, can we please move on to something new?

Episode Rating:

Agents of the Four Seasons: Dance of Spring is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.