天下制覇

I got it bad, but it hurts so good.

Impressions:

Let me recap the pre-OP sequence of this episode:

"My brother has a grave? What does this mean?"
"Oh, phone call from… MY BROTHER!?"
"Tomo, GET THE HELL OUT!"
–NINJA ON A MOTORBIKE THROUGH THE WINDOW–
"…"
"That mask is HI-LARIOUS! HAHAHAHAHAHAOHGodit’stryingtokillus."

Mood whiplash barely begins to cover it, but ye gods, this week’s episode was bloody intense. Aside from the 6 minute chase to kick things off ending with Tomo’s house being bombed, we had ‘Naotaka’ show up and going over basically every single dangling plot point in the show thus far. He’s Tomo1, Naotaka’s dead, Tomo was also dead, they used Misao to save Tomo2’s life, black hole’s eating the world, he’s a demon, and he’s dying of the magical demon sparklies. Oh yeah, and then Takatsuki collapsed of the magical demon sparklies before detonator-girl showed up to desecrate the church with their bodies. I’m sure I missed something, but while that’s normally a factor of my wandering attention span, I think this time it may just be because this episode tied up practically everything short of "let’s go save the world." It’s almost a joy that all the characters are finally on the same page as the rest of the audience.

Oh yeah, and the preview for next week had Tomo’s group shoulder to shoulder with Hiwako and company. Yeesh.

I’ll admit, the action could have certainly been better animated, and it was a little bit hamfisted the way Tomo1 literally showed up, wrapped up all the dangling plot stuff only to disappear again, and the art was especially dodgy this week, but man… I wish every episode was handled this ‘badly.’ Nobody even got in the way of Tomo1’s exposition either so it was brief and niced interspersed with shots of Tomo2’s corpse. Always a welcome sight. I’m glad that they managed to right the ship after last week’s fillertastic nonsense and the accompanying loss of direction from losing all its antagonists. Granted, I’m still not quite certain who the antagonists are at the moment, aside from an all-consuming black hole, but they’ve got at least three people trying to kill them again, so things are looking up as we head into the (possibly) final stretch.

Sorry, I’m not even going to try to summarize this one.

Preview:

Enemy of my enemy…