Almost three years after the end of the original season’s run, they’ve finally gotten around to making and releasing a second season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I’m not complaining. As much as I like the series, I think that getting oversaturated with it would kill the charm. That being said…
Time travel. It’s a staple of science fiction, and can be done rather well (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) or really…not so well (examples of this aren’t worth mentioning, so I won’t). Since it has been established that one of the characters in Haruhi is a time-traveler (Mikuru) and another considered such acts trivial (Yuki), it was only a matter of…uh…it was inevitable that the long-suffering Kyon would be sent back three years to help the cute junior-high version of Haruhi commit one of the misdemeanors Taniguchi, Kunikida, and Kyon had mentioned back in the very first episode.
Only one thing was missing in this first episode: Tsuruya. Then again, she’s really just a secondary character, so it would have been surprising to see her. From what I hear, in later story arcs, she plays a much larger role…
More and more, I’m of the opinion that the individual who really controls the universe and can destroy and re-create it subconsciously is not Haruhi, but Kyon. This hypothesis isn’t original to me, but it makes sense, especially when events in the later light novels are taken into account. Haruhi didn’t just choose Kyon, Kyon wanted Haruhi to exist—and through a convoluted sequence of events, caused her to exist—so she could choose him.
