天下制覇

"Quick guys… do nothing!"

Impressions:

The main thing that this episode suffers from was pacing problems severe enough to give you whiplash. It took them five minutes before they made it to Megumi’s coffin, and then another minute or two of shuffling around her grave before they opened it. And then a random vampire attack! At which point everything was put on pause again until the last three or four minutes of the episode when a vampire kid shows up at Natsuno’s house to kill him traumatize his parents with ventriloquism and hand painting. I question the wisdom of letting some unknown kid into your house after it has screamed at you, threatened you, and tried to bludgeon you with a giant fanged doll.

It’s definitely a marked step up from recent weeks and I’m glad they actually dug up the coffin after dragging the whole thing out across two episodes and a number of shots seeming like they were about to stop or be interrupted, but following it up with "okay guys, now we can’t do anything or tell anybody" and a bunch of flashbacks kills inertia before it even gets a chance to build. They need to make the good scenes flow together consistently and constantly, not drop an anvil on the show every time it starts to get interesting. There was absolutely no need for an entire day to take place between the start and end of the episode, and in fact, hurts the internal logic that this show seems so fond of explaining at length. Speaking of which, the whole charm and invitation things were pretty hamhanded. It would have definitely improved those scenes a lot more had we not had a bullet point list of how vampires worked last week. It just came off as obtrusively obvious to have them shine giant spotlights on those two points this week.