After Season 3 focused heavily on new character dynamics and felt a bit too removed from the original premise for me personally, I was very excited seeing that Season 4 seems to be going back to the roots a bit more, with less NEW character introductions and a bigger focus on the OGs. That being said, I was a tiny bit let down by the direction this first episode took with that. Haida's crush for Retsuko has been somewhat of a running theme that was seldomly directly tackled outside of S1. So picture my frustration when the first direct confrontation of it in a long time ended up ... like THIS. Haida seems to have lost all the confidence he had built up over the past few seasons, going way back to his initial cold feet attitude of S1. I am here to see their relationship finally develop, and I am aware that it is somewhat of a prerequisite to add some conflict to the mix to make things more interesting, but the way it is done here my enjoyment was highly diminished by a wave of frustration. I'm sure Haida will get his **** together over the course of the next few episodes, but considering the events of the past season his current behavior didn't quite line up with what I was expecting of his character at this point in time. I wish they would have gone for a different setup instead, but here we are. It's not terrible, but it urks me personally. There's still 9 episodes in this season to go though, so hopefully Haida will gain back his confidence rather sooner than later.
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