天下制覇

Talk about shoehorned-in eleventh hour development.

Impressions:

Not that poor of an episode, but it still felt very out of place, especially since it was basically an extended flashback in the middle of a fight between a tertiary character and Byakku. It didn’t help that Heisuke’s tragic past was pretty generic as well. The actual fighting was alright, though not overly impressive, and it is nice to see that Byakku does have some moves aside from injecting his bugs into other people, but for the most part, it was just "swarms of little monsters attack, Kagami skewers them, repeat after another 5 minutes of flashback." Still, it just feels like a waste because Heisuke has been around in… what… four or five episodes before this? And then he shows up again and gets a full episode dedicated to himself where he nearly evenly fights the head of the villains. This just felt wrong all around and I can’t imagine it having any effect on any of the plotlines already in motion… the Kekkaishi, Karasumori, Kokuboro’s aims… anything. I did find the production error when Heisuke’s glasses magically repaired themselves in a couple shots at the end to be somewhat amusing.