The alternate ending for Endless Eight, in which Kyon breaks his ‘phone, and therefore never gets entangled within Haruhi’s nefarious web of summer-sapping activities.

Of course, for this particular ending to work, you need to discard the traditional thought of Haruhi being God, as well as the popular alternative line of thinking – that it is, infact, Kyon who is all-powerful, and the Endless Eight cycle is actually broken due to him having finally completed his homework. No, you need to become aware of a terrifying third possibility – Kyon’s sister is the Almighty Incarnate.

Just think about it – every single day Kyon goes out doing exciting things with his chums, and never once does he think to invite his poor little sister. How cruel of him, eh? Finally, on the last iteration of the loop, Haruhi plays PS2 Tetris with her, thus relieving poor Imouto of the sensation of having wasted her summer, allowing August to come to it’s natural conclusion.

Or probably not.

Yesterdays episode of Saki finally saw the end of the preliminary team tournament. It also saw the end of the manga material (including the brand new chapter released only a few days prior), meaning that we are now free-wheeling into the horrifying territory of Gonzo-original content. The evidence that history provides make this a something of a terrifying prospect – Gonzo have done anime-original material before, and it’s never gone well. Given Ritz Kobayashi recent illness, I’m not optimistic about the amount of author-input that will have gone into the shows forthcoming episodes either.

I suppose it’s not necessarily terrible news – aside from the next episode giving us a break in the MahJong action by being a service-heavy pool episode, it seems likely that immediately afterwards we’ll be running straight into the individuals tournament (it was mentioned in this weeks episode that it was taking place in a weeks time). The benefit of this is that they at least won’t have to come up with vast numbers of anime-specific characters, as it’ll mostly be the same girls we’ve already seen playing over again.

Well, that’s for the girls, anyway – there is the matter of Kyotaro, the Kiyosumi MahJong Clubs sole male member, finally being able to play. Who’s he going to play against? I half-suspect we’ll never find out – either all his games will be played off-screen, or he’ll be put out of the contest immediately as a gag (still off-screen). Or he could keep going – surely playing against such freaky high-level players all the time should have upped his skills at least a little?

Then again, no-one is watching the show for the guys anyway, so I don’t suppose it matters.

The real concern, I guess, is that they’ve only really got at most, what, six episodes to resolve the singles tourney? Given how long the team tournament has been stretching on, that’s really not going to cut it. I guess the ideal situation would be for them to stretch out the show for this period without really making that much progress – at the rate the manga releases and the anime has been consuming it, we’d probably be able to get a thirteen episode season out of it every year. That’s assuming they don’t break from the manga so much that they can’t reconcile things later, though. Here’s hoping Gonzo don’t shoot themselves in the foot here!

I do also suspect that Gonzo won’t be able to resist cramming plenty anime-specific characters into the arc as well. There is a way in – each school would only put their best players forward for the team tourney, but we don’t know the per-school limit for entries into the individuals. Could Touka’s maid be playing? Then there’s the fact that there’s probably going to be new players from schools without enough players to enter the team matches. I suppose some new players are absolutely essential in order to inject some new blood into the affair – we’ve already seen what all the current players have to offer, after all.

I think the best case is probably going to be them adding an additional round of matches prior to those where the manga is going to kick-off the proceedings – introduce a bunch of anime-specific characters for some of our players to be matched against, but have them all taken out, after a dramatic game, of course, resulting in things ending with the situation being pretty much as it is at the moment.