天下制覇

Five women around, and Watanuki is ogling the boy fox. Good work, kid.

Impressions:

Well, to the surprise of nobody, they turned a short, relatively meaningless chapter on the dangers of buying refridgerators and the thunder gods that become trapped in them, into a mass clusterblockage of every single character in the show, all making a guest appearance basically to have a picnic. I didn’t even like the thunder god chapter originally, and I like it even less when it’s used as an excuse to have the entire cast show up, say hi, and then wander off into the corner again. I probably came into this episode expecting to dislike it, so take my opinion with even more grains of salt than usual, but come on… why not just have everybody do a curtain call while we’re at it? It’s not like the thunder god stuff even made much sense in the first place. "Watch out, some fridges are evil, and some fridges have thunder gods in them. Now you’re noticing things with portals!"

Meh, final thoughts after the images.

Final Thoughts:

Well, I kind of feared that xxxHOLiC Kei would blow its load early, and unfortunately, that’s what happened. The Spider Queen arc was better animated, directed, drawn, everything than the rest of the series. If things had stuck to that level of quality through the entire series, I’d have been pleased as punch. The haphazard mishmash that they made of Kohane’s arc was just terrible though. Perhaps I’m being overly hard on it since I’m (again) familiar with what it should have been, but I simply cannot understand why you’d make the decision to just suddenly cut it off halfway through and say "everybody lives happily ever after." Isn’t that against every single other theme that xxxHOLiC has ever offered? Connections, prices for your desires, etc. A haircut and a new job and things turn around 100% for Kohane.

Himawari’s arc was also a bit of a letdown to me because of how forcefed the foreshadowing to us for eleven straight episodes. Nary did an episode go by without someone or something saying "Himawari is ebbbbuuuuuuuuuuuullll" and some black smoke rising off of her or Watanuki’s finger. All that we were missing was a Spanish maid pointing at her and screaming "La Diabla! La DIABLA!" while Watanuki looked confused.

It wasn’t all bad though. The music was certainly unique, though the tracks were entirely too short and looped far too often, and again, the Spider Queen episodes were excellent. It’s a shame they couldn’t maintain those production values and that atmosphere through the whole thing. Alright, now I’m starting to repeat myself, so let’s bring it in.

It was an alright show half the time, an excellent show for three episodes, and the rest was pretty painful filler and relative nonsense. That probably puts it slightly above the first series just for the ratio of good episodes to poor, but I still feel like both seasons have been characterized by a lot of squandered potential. I don’t know what else to say, so let’s assign the arbitrary rating of seventeen parsnips out of three watermelons.