22/7 started this anime season promisingly. It presented us with a pretty simple premise. An idol series turned sideways–the members of the idol troupe brought together not by happenstance, but by the government, working on the orders of a mysterious artefact called The Wall.

A literal plot device in many ways, The Wall was the main draw of the show for a certain segment of people (myself included) who were curious to see how the thing factored into what seemed like it was willingly aiming for being a weird and subversive series. Instead, 7 episodes into its 12-episode run, 22/7 seems hellbent on ignoring its own central premise in favor of what it’s becoming apparent are some major writing problems. Barring some kind of huge twist, I feel confident in calling them such.

Some of this seems like it was inevitable. For whatever it may be trying to do artistically, 22/7 has the problem of needing to promote the actual 22/7. The Yasushi Akimoto-backed idol group after whom the project is named. This isn’t the first time he’s dipped his hand into this kind of multimedia hydra. Those who’ve seen bizarre “well, Symphogear did well” idol anime-in-space AKB0048 should be familiar with some of this. But AKB had the benefit of trying to be fun, not subversive. With 22/7‘s more ambitious focus, its problems are more apparent.

The most recent episode (the 7th) focuses on Jun. As is now the show’s formula, the episode takes Jun–a character we’ve hitherto learned little about–and cuts between expositing her backstory and her doing some Wall-mandated task. The idea, in theory, seems to be that this interpolation draws parallels between where the idol started out and what they’re doing as part of the group. This episode, in fact, in a vacuum, is actually very good at that. I think this makes it all the more interesting to examine this episode as opposed to a more obviously-mediocre one (last week’s episode was downright lame and featured an apparent message that was somewhere between noncommittal and cowardly) because it shows how all the great directing in the world can’t entirely salvage poorly-thought-out writing.

Jun has to fill in for her groupmates–all of them–due to them coming down with food poisoning. What this means is that a day crammed full of various idol minutiae is now the sole responsibility of a single person. The show’s writers decide to play this comedically. While we could sit here and ruminate on the idea of playing an idol overworking herself to the point of exhaustion as a joke and how that might not be a particularly great idea for various reasons, we’ll let that one slide. It’s honestly the least of this episode’s issues.

Jun, we learn, had what is either very severe asthma or something similar to it as a child. She was often hospitalized and could rarely attend school. A major underpinning of this series’ structure is that to a one, every girl whose past has been explored so far has a tragic one. In a pretty specific way, too, but we’ll get to that.

During one particular hospital stay, she meets Yuu. Yuu is everything that Jun, disillusioned with the world and deeply depressed by her isolation from her illness, is not. Eternally happy and optimistic, the two apparent opposites soon become friends as Jun is taken by Yuu’s philosophy that life is like an amusement park and that one should live every day to the fullest.

Do keep in mind that this is not told in a single contiguous chunk. We cut back and forth between this narrative and the comedic scenes of Jun running hither and tither filling in for her groupmates several times. Including some scenes of her pulling off spot-on impressions of the rest of the group. These are actually pretty damn clever, and to the episode’s credit, they do a great job of building Jun’s character. As said, our girls really seem to only get one episode apiece to really take the center stage, so economy of character is important.

Back in the past, Jun and Yuu become close friends. The subtextual framing is vague, but things like sneaking to karaoke and singing a love song together, listening to music together via the ol’ “you get one earbud and I get the other” trick, and exchanging paper hearts, seem to at least broadly imply that that relationship may have even moved beyond that, or at least was starting to. Especially given that much of this is shown in an honestly beautiful montage set to a wonderfully twee slice of idol pop balladry called “Fortune Cookie of Love”.

This all seems well and good, right? She clearly made, at the most conservative interpretation, a very close friend, and she’s doing alright nowadays, what with being in an idol group and all.

Well, no points for guessing how this all ends.

Yuu eventually gets sicker. She does not make it. Jun miraculously gets better. A life for a life, is the framing.

The depressing part is that through this plot twist, the directing remains great. The animation, too, is probably the highest-quality seen in the series so far. Character acting well beyond the series’ standard is present here, and it’s clear that whoever wrote this envisioned it as a huge emotional climax, where we learn “the real reason” why Jun is the way she is. How it’s so beautifully tragic, etc. etc. etc. etc. It’s all nonsense, of course. There is nothing beautiful about two young girls having their bond with each other severed by sudden death, no matter how the survivor copes.

Yuu’s death happens first, and Jun is depressed for a while. As she has every right to be.

Then she gets the news that her asthma–or whatever it is, because being specific with your life-impairing anime illnesses risks making your characters too relatable I suppose–is in recession. She tries to find a sort of solace in this development, but while the show tries to frame this as valid reasoning, were Jun a real person it would be clear to me that she is lying to herself as a coping mechanism.

In a vacuum, this entire plot line is at most, mildly unpleasant. Tragedy can happen to anyone and there is value in examining that tragedy, and I’m on record as being a fan of melodrama if it’s employed to productive ends. However, 22/7‘s bad habit is the repetition and specificity of its victims of tragedy and what form that tragedy takes, and what that reveals about the people who made it.

To lay it on the table; of the four 22/7 members whose backstories we’ve been told so far, 3 have another woman that was important to them who has since died. In Sakura’s case it was her grandmother. In Reika’s, it was her mother, who died shortly after she was born. Of course, we’ve already relayed Jun’s story. And even Miu, the series’ ostensible protagonist, became an idol in part to support her own sickly mother. I would be wholly unsurprised if said mother passes away sometime during the series.

To say that all of this taken together is “problematic” seems like flattening the issue. This is a very specific kind of ugly writing, one that tries to conflate “women’s stories” with “women suffering”. It’s insidious and unpleasant.

Yet, in the interest of fairness, I don’t think this episode is devoid of merit. Or indeed, bad at all. Its directorial element makes it go down a lot easier than it otherwise would, and the episode director deserves credit there.

To be even fairer, it is possible this is all building up to a grand reveal. There are, in fact, enough vague outlines of what you could call hints to imply, if you squint, that somehow this is all The Wall’s doing. That would be a twist for the ages, and would go some way to redeeming this whole saga, depending on how it was handled.

Yet, somehow, this feels like wishful thinking. Even this episode’s ED animation ,which shows Yuu and Jun happy together in some pastel dreamscape, feels like a cruel joke. It’s probably not meant as one, but one gets the impression that in a general sense, no one writing for 22/7 quite knows what they’re doing.

If I am wrong, and this all turns out to be a gigantic fakeout, I will be more than happy to eat my words. I suppose the weeks to come, alone, will tell.