Catgirl alert! There’s a catgirl in this show! I mean, you probably already knew that because of the opening, but now she’s actually introduced in the show. Her name is Korone Hououji, and she’s the owner of the bike shop next to the bakery the girls always hang out at. Korone wears cat ears and tail simply because they’re cute, plus she’s a character of diminutive stature. She’s small and looks like a child, which is by all means not an original gag, nor a particularly welcome one in this instance.

Inevitably, when someone brings attention to her childlike appearance, she’ll get briefly angry about it. “Hey, who ya calling a kid?!”. Yeah, shit like that, with absolutely nothing innovative to be added. The set up to the joke is unremarkable, as is the joke itself and the reaction of everyone around when it happens. It’s pathetic gags like this that truly make me feel like my enjoyment has just been stabbed in a non-major artery. I only have so much enjoyment to lose, as it continues to seep out of my open wound, and if you continue to stab me with your mundane attempts at comedy, bleeding out is inevitable…which is to say “dropping out”, but I think you know what I meant.

Anyway—Oh! I almost forgot! Last week’s episode ended with the girls collectively having a moment of undelighted surprise. As if they were about to cross a finish line and then some stranger waiting at the end smacked them down with a baseball bat, the principle denied their application for starting a bicycle club. Now, only a naïve, dumbass loser pervert baka hentai would’ve come to such a painfully simple conclusion that the girls simply needed a fifth member and that’s why they were turned down (wait, was pervert really necessary? Also, I spot redundancies). What a contrived reason, even for Girls Gone Bike. No, what the girls really needed right now was to…“produce results”. Whatever the fuck that means.

Quite a vague request, and part of the girls’ challenge is to discover what that means. This leads them to the bakery where they meet the catgirl bike shop owner. She decides to give them a lecture and let them try out some bikes, as the first step to producing results, they deduced, would be to actually have bicycles. They all go for road bikes, are very pricy and clearly out of the range of a typical high school girl. Apparently most of them can afford or already have one though.

All except for Hiromi, who can barely ride a road bike, let alone purchase one. She doesn’t get the one she wants by the end of the episode either, which is at least a better outcome than magically obtaining it through bullshit plot devices and characters acting utterly and disgustingly altruistic for no acceptable reason.

Anyway, catgirl teaches about the different types of bikes, plus she touches upon the main theme of the show, being that bicycles open your world up. Of course, so do cars and trains and boats and planes, but who give a shit about those things, right? After all that, Shiki sensei comes in with an idea for what they can do to produce results: A cycling tournament.

And that’s pretty much the episode. Of course, my personal episode review wouldn’t be complete without touching upon the scenery of Girls Gone Bike, which is one of the few things that’s worthwhile about this show. They keep reusing that lackluster, CG ocean side bike path. It looks utterly inconsistent with the rest of the show and when the girls ride through, I can only think of it as amateurish. Also, this episode is still following the trend of having little scenery to show. There were more outdoor shots than the previous couple episodes, but a lot of them were reused. Disappointing, to say the least. I’m probably only going to give this show one more chance.