Sometimes, there’s this exchange that happens when introducing an anime:

“Have you seen this show? It is wild.”

“What’s it about?”

“Y-you’ll just have to see.”

And the above doesn’t happen because you were trying to prank them, or because the show was simply about shocking plot twists. Rather, it’s because the show in question just keeps throwing one curve ball after another, and whatever conception you had of the series at the start gets tossed out the window.

Anyway, have you seen Turkey? It is wild.

Turkey! Time to Strike (as it’s called in English) centers around the five girls of a high school bowling club who, while dealing with some drama that threatens to tear the team apart, end up in a situation none of them could have ever expected. If that’s enough to convince you, go watch it now, because there’s a major spoiler in Episode 1 that kicks the series off for real.

For those who’ve decided to stick around: An intense match between two members suddenly goes awry when lightning strikes, one of the bowling balls glows, and the girls all get sent hundreds of years back in time. Surprise! It’s actually a time travel story. After rescuing a young and handsome warrior from the battlefield they find themselves on (through the power of bowling, of course), they end up living with his family. Now, they have to adjust to living in a world without electricity while trying to figure out how to return back to the modern day, and in the process learn about the family of siblings that are taking care of them?

(Turkey, by the way, is the term for when you get three strikes in a row. Time to Strike was possibly added to the English release because while having just the word Turkey written out makes an impact in Japanese, it would not have the same effect in English).

If this series were simply about time displacement hijinks that swap a DeLorean for a bowling ball, the show would be pretty bizarre and memorable already. But what pushes it far past the line is the fact that it actually puts some serious thought into the execution of its premise. “No, really—What if a bowling team wound up in feudal Japan?” Some of it is about teaching a generation past about the joy of bowling or learning the basic politics of the period, but then the show will get starkly serious at times. It’ll go from teenage girls using the thundering sound of bowling balls as an enemy distraction, to discussions about tragic loss of family and deep personal feelings of guilt, to the moral differences in the act of killing between eras, back to wacky bowling fun. Tonal whiplash doesn’t even begin to describe what’s going on here.

But somehow, the team behind Turkey managed to pull it off and create an emotionally powerful show that uses bowling as an unlikely conduit for healing and therapy across time. Across 12 episodes, the anime never stops surprising, and it even ends in both a satisfying and unexpected manner. It takes the “girls doing a specific activity” concept so perennially popular in anime, and hits on both the slice-of-life and drama levels in ways that feel incongruous, yet ultimately harmonize.