Title: Sora wataru kyoushitsu / 宙わたる教室
Rating: 8 / 10
Recommended for:
Those who want to watch an uplifting true story about rising against the odds but not presented in an overly idealistic and dramatic fashion and/or are fans of the cast especially Kubota Masataka
Liked:
- While rising-against-the-odds stories about the underprivileged or those facing challenges in life due to various reasons are aplenty, they can sometimes come across as overly dramatic or idealistic as if everything will turn out well just because you work hard or put in effort. However, given that this drama was based on a true story, this kept the story grounded in reality while maintaining that encouraging and uplifting vibe about doing something about the situation rather than just lamenting that there's nothing which can be done and accept things as they are.
- The "student" characters in the story had varied circumstances thus added a multi-faceted angle to the challenges which people studying in night school faced. In addition, many of the problems they faced had a "modern take" that were not featured much in past stories set in night or part-time school such as dyslexia and orthostatic dysregulation which many people were unaware of or knew very little about in the past. What also made this a bit different from past stories of a similar nature was that the students were focusing their efforts in a science club which was "extra time" they had to spend in school on top of attending classes and studying. While they faced slights, discrimination, prejudice and bias because of their backgrounds and the fact that they studied in a night school part-time rather than full-time, it was natural to feel like cheering them on as the story made these characters very endearing and relatable even though you may not have gone through the same thing as they did.
- The acting from the cast was generally of a high standard and I personally liked Ito Aoi, Maria Theresa Gow and Issey Ogata's performances a lot because they were such naturals. However, Kubota Masataka really stood out with his mellow and somewhat subdued acting which still allowed the character's emotions to manifest across the screen without hysterics.
Disliked:
- Although most parts of the story were still believable and realistic, I felt that the portion about how Fujitake saw a more level playing field in scientific research when he went to the US was a tad idealistic and not so reflective of how things are in the world now. I could understand his frustration about how resources, power, discrimination and bias stood in the way when it came to the Japanese scientific research field but the way the story described it, it seemed to suggest that bias and discrimination were not present outside of Japan. In the past, many dramas would have painted this ideal scenario of "the grass is always greener on the other side" but everyone can see that racism and discrimination are present everywhere. As such, it bothered me a bit to see how the drama still tried to say that going outside of Japan was the only way to be free of such restrictions and soar high depending on your potential and talent.
- For those who are not too familiar with or know very little about scientific jargon and terminology, you can feel a bit lost at times when the dialogue gets a bit too technical. I lost track of the number of times when that happened to me especially when there were explanations of scientific concepts. I was also unsure if the English subtitle translations did portray everything accurately for these parts. For example, when I saw that the synopsis on the Amazon Prime listing page kept putting Gakuto's name as Taketo, I wondered what was causing this discrepancy. While the same Kanji name can be pronounced in both ways, people were calling the character Gakkun and Gakuto. I can't help but think that whoever wrote those summaries didn't watch the drama or there was no QC for what was put there.
