Turkey! Time to Strike – Episodes 1-2

Content Warning: flashing lights (end of episode 1), gore, sexual menace

What’s it about? The Ikkokukan High School bowling team is on the verge of collapse, as newcomer Godai Rina feels disgusted by the team’s lack of competitiveness. Team captain Otonashi Mai struggles to keep everyone together, but that gets a lot more complicated when they’re pulled through a mysterious rift in space.

Reviewing the first episode of Turkey! on its own is basically a pointless endeavor, given that it’s an extended fake-out that reveals the actual purpose and context of the show only in the last 30 seconds. It’s not a bad episode, but as a lover of shows that take weird left turns, it fails to measure up to some of the best in the business. The Executioner and Her Way of Life is perhaps the most satisfying recent example, pulling the brakes halfway through in a deeply satisfying rejection of the potato-kun power fantasy isekai. But the gold standard, and the one Turkey is closer to nodding toward, is School Live!–a premiere that likewise only reveals itself in the final moments but does so by recontextualizing the setting in which it will spend the rest of the story, and in retrospect says a great deal about both its world and the characters’ struggles.

Turkey’s opener, meanwhile, spends its first 20 minutes in contemporary Japan, playing at being a fairly mediocre club anime, only for the prestige to produce an isekai instead. That’s fun! We learn about the bowling club’s dynamics, certainly, and there are a few ominous hints about a strange construction site in town, but it’s material that could’ve easily turned in the first half of episode one, given that each girl only has one assigned trait thus far: Mai is a people-pleaser with bowling-related trauma; Rina is bluntly competitive; Sayuri is a gentle giant; Nozomi is vain; and Nanase is a nerd.

In fairness, it does set the tone in a way, because pacing is Turkey’s greatest issue thus far. There’s a Kid in King Arthur’s Court sort of charm to the girls using their bowling equipment to turn the tables on some superstitious bandits, but the first half of the episode lingers overlong on the girls working out that they’re in the Sengoku era. I love all of these things in concept, and the fact that the girls seem to have gone back to meet another girl who incidentally invents bowling is amazingly inane. I could not admire the commitment to the bit more. But so far the execution is a consistent 7/10 split (which the show terms a “snake eyes,” a term I never heard used in 10 years of adolescent bowling).

I’m trying not to hold it against the show’s prospects that its director has headed some of the most insulting-bad anime I’ve ever seen (Minami Kamakura High School Girls Cycling Club, Mirage of Blaze), a hentai memetic for its ugliness that I frankly give points for being about weirdo writers doing cosplay roleplay (Darling), and a show I will never get to see because it was pulled due to plagiarism accusations (Tokyo Babylon). On the other hand, series composer Hiruta Naomi is working on her first anime project (though she’s apparently quite well regarded in live action), which doesn’t mean the story won’t be strong but does mean the show is might bite off more than it can chew. A strong director could help avoid those weak points, but….see above.

Still, the heart in me that loves bald-faced conceptual audacity can’t possibly hate this show. It might lose the plot in a few episodes and crash into a wall while trying to maneuver between gory war piece and can-do club show, but I’m more concerned that it will putter along at this speed and leave its best potential unrealized. Either way, it’s definitely got my attention.