What’s it about? 24-year-old Rinko loves her apartment, a peaceful space where she can come home and relax with her anime merch after a long day at the office. Her domestic life is upended when her neighbor kicks holes through her walls, and Rinko finds herself in an unexpected share-house situation between the men on either side of her: one a sensible but suspicious young man who is pretending to be Rinko’s boyfriend, and the other the angry, sleep-deprived mangaka behind Rinko’s favorite series.
Art is subjective, and media will speak to different people in different ways. For example, one person’s whimsical, slapstick love triangle rom-com is another person’s nightmare scenario. If I suspend my disbelief and squint, I can see the appeal of this premise, but unfortunately I spent a lot of this episode physically cringing away from the screen in second-hand discomfort. Mostly due to personal taste, to be fair, but from a feminist reviewer’s point of view as well. I think this wants to be an upbeat comedy, but it feels more like a horror story about men taking over a woman’s precious personal space.
Credit where it’s due, this isn’t a badly-written episode of TV. For example, the main reason this set-up gave me such a profound case of what I believe the TikTok kids call “the ick” is because the early scenes did a great job establishing Rinko’s character and getting me emotionally invested in her. I imagine she’ll be relatable to many viewers as a young woman just Doing Her Best to survive the corporate grind, delighted to come home to a geeky space she’s uniquely cultivated as her own. I laughed along with her goofy moments and felt a real rush of second-hand joy watching her at peace in her apartment, invincible and free among her carefully-curated cute décor and merchandise from the series that mean a lot to her.
Naturally, I felt all the air go out of the room when her asshole neighbor Usada kicks a hole in her wall. It’s bad enough that he’s pounding his fist against it (again, Rinko’s anxiety about this interruption of her quiet space was palpable and very relatable) but when he’s confronted about it he shoves his whole stupid angry foot through the plaster. I felt Rinko’s fear and anguish, and I felt so, so bad for her. Imagine my bafflement, then, when Rinko immediately forgives this guy because she recognizes him as the artist of her favorite manga. And cooks for him, and waves it off when he turns up in her apartment while she’s asleep, and rejects the notion that he should get in any trouble at all for his actions, because he won’t be able to draw if he’s arrested!
The dissonance is enough to give you whiplash. It’s jarring how Rinko’s motivations shift so quickly from protecting her space to Doing Anything This Man Tells Her simply because she loves his work. I’m sure there’s a thread of commentary in there about how creators can get away with being horrible people if their art is popular enough, but I’m not sure Pardon the Intrusion is thinking on that level. Pardon the Intrusion just thinks all this is funny, which is where it really lost me. Having latched onto and related to Rinko so hard in the early parts of the episode, I was yelling “get this dickhead out of my house!!” on her behalf.
To make matters worse there are, in fact, two dickheads in her house. Satsuki, her neighbor on the other side, initially seems to be a kind friend and the voice of reason. But before the episode is over he’s revealed a devious smirk and dropped a cheeky little joke about being more of a Big Bad Wolf than a grandma, and now I want to throw him straight in the bin, too.
Add in his fake-dating act with Rinko and this poor girl is literally stuck between two men who feel entitled to her time, space, and physical labor. Usada’s motives are “pure” in that he just wants food and her devotion as a fan, but Satsuki remains more mysterious and thus more ominous. If the show wants me to root for either of them, it has failed spectacularly.
The opening credits lovingly focus on scenes of Usada and Satsuki eating Rinko’s home-cooked meals together, and the episode ends on a domestic scene of them all sitting down to dinner. Again, the dissonance here is jarring. The show frames all this as funny and cute and oh, the shenanigans! But all I can think about is how wildly uncomfortable this arrangement would be, how I want both of these men as far away from Rinko as possible, and how strange and sad it is that Rinko’s had to relinquish her peaceful place so comedy hijinks can occur. What little motivation and autonomy she had at the beginning of the episode is effectively squashed out of existence by the end, and they want me to laugh along like that’s, what, charming? Not me, not today. Can we get Rinko a new apartment next to the main characters from A Mangaka’s Weirdly Wonderful Workplace or something instead?
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