天下制覇

Truly a tour de force. 

Two things. Dark Rabbit’s last (fanservice) episode will likely be delayed awhile because despite Teletama broadcasting it, Niconico is apparently choosing to believe that it doesn’t exist, so it may take quite awhile for the show to appear on the interwebs in any form (edit: Spoke too soon, they just put it up a bit late despite not having it on their schedule). Also, the second Higukira OVA came out yesterday. Similarly, I’ve got no idea when it’ll actually appear, so I’ll get to it when I get to it.

Impressions:

Since this is the penultimate episode and they need to bring everything to some kind of climax, it’s time to… retroactively introduce a new character and then kill him in a flashback taking up the whole episode! That alone isn’t what made this episode so good though. No, it wasn’t that. Nor was it the flashbacks within a flashback. The true genius of this episode comes from the CG planes. Has anybody ever thought to make an entire episode with nested flashbacks and CG planes before? No, sir, I think not.

So yeah, yet another episode where another person turns into sparklies while Hugh (and technically Dalian) have absolutely no idea what’s going on and barely anything to do with it, but this time, in the past. It also sort of introduced (finally) that third wandering pair, but other than "they’re fairly evil," there’s not much else to say about them. And you know… we kind of already knew that. That leaves the main draw of the episode being Hugh’s CG plane morphing into a giant naked Hugh flying at a giant cloud man. And that was what makes Dantalian the special show that it is.