Ten’s in love again. This time with a flower shop owner. Making the mistake of asking Ataru for money to buy a flower from her, he finds himself competing for her affections. The pair buy a gardenia to raise in order to impress her and on the way home are harassed by Cherry who proclaims that the flower is bad luck.
Ataru’s warped plan is to overfeed the plant so it will wilt and he and the flower shop owner can heal it together. However, he doesn’t bank on Ten giving it some alien fertiliser and making it far more healthy than is sane.
When they take the giant gardenia to show the flower shop owner, the plant starts talking and moving, proclaiming it’s love for the shop owner. However, she rejects him, for she is in love with the Japanese quince! This all plays out as another melodrama parody that UY often goes for. We end the episode with the gardenia living on the Moroboshi’s roof, apparently now in love with Lum…
Animation-wise this is the wildest episode so far, there’s a vast amount of running involved and even when characters are standing still there’s a lot of extreme angles and poses involved. Unsurprisingly this is in no small part due to the animation of Masahito Yamashita once again. Here’s a particularly frantic sequence from the second half of the episode.
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Kazunori Ito wrote this episode, and we’re now getting to the point where he’s going to become the main voice of the show in terms of the writing.
Keiji Hayakawa storyboards and directs, and Asami Endo is the animation director.