a lot of ppl love bad buddy episode 1-4 but we have short memories so everyone is forgetting that episodes 1-4 were introduced as the "cliche" episodes, the tropes. everything in them is incredibly rote, they're just given a new magic for two reasons:
1) ohm and nanon's acting elevating even the most tired trope (shove against a wall/gay engineers/over the top bickering/childhood connection/rivals to friends/over the top flirting about being boyfriends/jealousy over female character/tsundere x himbo dynamic/cute pacifist sister/Classic One Braincell Friend Group™/i can go on) so that even as a trope, it is enjoyable to watch
2) every trope zips by smoothly, every tired misunderstanding cleared up by the end of the episode, we wave at them as they pass by and they don't overstay their welcome
what happens is that although these episodes are pretty much just overplayed dynamics, in each episode there is a hint of something deeper at play, usually at the end of every episode (in episode 1, the way they don't want to be the first to add the other's chat ID, in episode 2, pran's face under the bed when pat's dad comes in, in episode 3 pran's face when pat gives him the guitar, in episode 4 pran holding back tears in bed). you'll notice these are all pran's moments, because in the first four episodes it seems like pat is the driving force of giving cliche after cliche, trope after trope, oblivious charming male lead.
so for episodes 1-4, the depth of bad buddy is mostly driven by pran and nanon's performance. that although he exists in this silly, cliché world he is fully realized and he's the reason these tropes don't leave an aftertaste.
and then episode 5 happens.
basically episode 5 is still and will always be magical, because it does two things. one, it stops giving us pran's perspective. pran has been the grounding presence of the first four episodes. deciding to show us pat suddenly gives this show a new dimension, like the rest of the moon is no longer in shadow. everything becomes rounder, clearer, fully realized.
the second thing episode five does is it lets the tropes come to a sudden, screeching halt when pran tells him "you have got to stop doing this to me." because pran calls him out on what he's been doing for four episodes, and that's also something that is in itself unprecedented. in a lesser show, character would never address this because the writers don't want to address it. the fact that it's unspoken is usually the tension the writers rely on. but in bad buddy, pran says it, because he's a person, and he reacts like one, and their relationship is more than unspoken tension, it's communication and love.
episode five is the bad buddy turning point for a reason. from episode five onwards, the show never leans into tropes for plot again, only for the occasional laugh or to call them out. every single trope that is laid out from episodes 1-4 is subverted (ink and pa end up together, pat's friend group turns out to be thoughtful and supportive, they stop doing the "hands covering mouth freeze frame" thing, all their physical affection is reciprocal, everyone communicates, and so on and so forth.)
but the biggest trope episode 5 subverts is pat. pat's character is so layered that episode 5 does something very wonderful: when you revisit episodes 1-4 again, you see that pat was there all along, just being slowly drawn out (through coming back to himself as he meets pran, and through the narrative itself only showing us glimpses of his sunshine self.) pat isn't a himbo, pran isn't a tsundere. and the best part is they never actually claimed to be, it was just how the show was originally framed that led for them to be categorised into archetypes (if you don't believe me, check how the earlier fanfic for this show portrays patpran vs the latest fanfic) and then swiftly pulls the curtain to show you that they were there all along, looking at the audience as the audience looked at them.
