Assassination Classroom vol. 17

After vol. 17 spent its last couple of chapters setting things up for Nagisa and Karma to pull a heist on the International Space Station, I was expecting some slam-bang action to be in the offing.  That’s… not what happens here.  The two middle-school-kids get the drop on the astronauts and after some posturing and exposition some mutual respect develops and everyone comes away from the encounter happy.  Especially the kids because they’re able to fix things so that Koro-Sensei now has less than a one-percent chance of exploding and destroying the Earth in the process.  That’s great!  At least, it would be if it didn’t read to me like the time Spider Jerusalem learned that only one percent of the people with the same kind of degenerative brain disease he had didn’t turn into drooling vegetables.  And we all know how that turned out.  (Because everyone here has read “Trasnsmetropolitan,” right?)  This basically winds up being an opening that I was expecting much better things from given the series’ history.

At least things pick up in the rest of the volume as it’s mostly a lot of feel-good filler as “Assassination Classroom” starts to ramp things up for the finale.  We get to see how Koro-sensei is trying to help the kids with their highschool entrance exams and it’s as full of wacky hijinks as you’d expect.  Particularly when everyone in the class has to dance around how some of them aren’t doing as well as others.  The craziness gets knocked up a notch when Valentine’s Day rolls around and the exchanging of chocolates begins.  There’s plenty of (comedic) drama involved in seeing how the girls go about giving chocolates to the guys they like, with a special focus shown to two supporting characters as one of them finds out how wrong things can go when you combine romance with trying to assassinate Koro-sensei.  It’s good times all around after the opening chapter is done with, which is good because it looks like the bad guys are starting to get their act together.  Which is a good time for that as we’ve only got four volumes left in the series.