Hotel Inhumans Season 2

Genuinely such a beautiful portrayal of human emotions. Every single second of this episode, I sat in that eerie feeling that built up from the first second I heard the first piano key start playing. I absolutely adore Subaru and what he had to go through, and I have so much sympathy for him because it's so wonderful to see play out the way it does. The fact that this is a piano-centric story makes the soundtrack wondrous and ethereal while also constantly adding to the underlying tension that just seeps from every corner of this episode. I wouldn't change anything about the way this episode panned out; I feel completely shell-shocked (in a good way) and do, in fact, need a little while to process what I've just seen. Would never have expected something this amazing to be an opening story.

Genuinely such a great opener to the season. Off the bat, I felt engaged with our main character of the episode and the scenario their line of work has put them in and, because of the nature of this current plot line, the soundtrack felt particularly praiseworthy and outstanding. The discussion of character dynamics in our main plot is so entertaining and one can only imagine how much more this is going to be explored in the next part. Overall, a remarkably compelling twenty minutes which makes me want to dive straight into the continuation of this storyline.

The way this show uses silence is genuinely so beautiful to me. It allows everything apart from the atmosphere and the soundtrack to take over the viewer, leaving these massive gaps in direct communication to let us just bathe in the everyday reality of the characters we see on our screens. Aside from just general praise for the season/series thus far, despite us being introduced to a character who's really unappealing for me, I love the focus on Ikuro this episode. He's clearly this show's version of a main character, almost a proxy for the audience since he feels like an anomaly in the context of this hotel - a being too kind to exist alongside everyone else, and yet he fits in inexplicably. We have our episodely plot of helping out a guest, the story of which is truly just a sweet one with nothing really to hide and dissect, which is why the Ikuro focus helps to tie everything together and his conflicts with Kirihara add the friction that would otherwise be missing. Currently, this is shaping up to be one of my favourite things to air this season.