Grown-up Time

Synopsis

A new foreign language teacher appears, Irina Jelavic. She is saved from some punks by Koro and is highly infatuated by him afterwards. But the students know something’s not right.

Turns out, Irina is an assassin and seduction is her first tactic, which works wonders. She sets about her plan and requests a Vietnamese coffee from Koro. As soon as Koro sets off, Irina gets everything ready for her plans and gathers intel first from the students, who start to dislike her attitude instantly.

Irina leads Koro into the shed and distracts him enough for her three helpers to lay hundreds of bullets into him, but they’re real bullets, which of course doesn’t even scratch him.

After that fails and refusing to teach the kids, everyone chases her out of the classroom.

Karasuma then shows her around the school on how everyone’s acting out their two roles in this school as assassin/student and teacher/target. So if she can’t do a teacher/assassin, then she should leave.

So she takes that advice and becomes nice enough to gain the approval of the students.

Thoughts

It makes perfect sense to bring a professional assassin to try and assassinate someone. Maybe they should’ve thought of it earlier, but I guess they’re still figuring out all the logistics of everything perhaps.

Though, I have to say Irina’s outrageous actions this episode makes me question her competence as an assassin. I mean for one thing what kind of assassin doesn’t use the right tools to kill someone? Surely Irina knows that normal weapons won’t work. Arrogance or stupidity? Probably a mixture of both is my guess, or perhaps just not used to the foam weapons and bb guns? And secondly, with her short fuse, it doesn’t even feel like she’s trying, just feels like a bad comedy act. Though it’s more how the comical side of the episode was played out by not playing her part well and not researched it. I mean she should’ve at least researched into how to teach, it surely can’t be that difficult to pretend and if anything that is part of her job. Most assassins I’m aware of are fairly emotionless or can deal with being annoyed, you need to be a good actor to fool people, not just rely on good looks. She was way too obvious and quite sloppy.

On A random note, I loved the assassination badminton, must be pretty difficult to hit a ball with wooden knives.

With a professional assassin coming in and looks to be teaching them phrases that could be useful in assassination, if one of them kills Koro at least the others can find a good assassination filled career. Although so far, I’m not so sure on Irina’s actually teaching them…

With yet another new character I think it’s high time they moved on with where they’re taking this series, as apart from the setting we really don’t have anything else. The big questions are of course still to do with Koro’s backstory and what an intriguing tale that is.