天下制覇

"Torquemada steals home!"

Impressions:

In a rare change of pace, the first half was the more exciting one this week. Still didn’t really have the great action of some of the other episodes, but the scene with Horizon regaining a piece of herself and Toori comforting her was quite nice. The music in particular fit that scene perfectly. As I said before though, they really could have/should have done a better job building Horizon and Toori’s relationship through the whole show (like say… instead of all that Mikawa stuff early on), but taking it at this episode alone, they did an admirable job.

Once the escape was made, most of the rest of the episode was just a victory party and setup for the next season. Random shadow figures leaving "Please kill me, all" in blood, the lesbian angels romancing each other in public, Futayo romancing a wine bottle in public, Kimi romancing everything with two legs and a pulse… you know, the usual. Well, then after the ED played, the Spanish baseball team showed up to invade with a "To Be Continued" as basically a 5 minute promo for the next season. That’s pushing it a little bit even for a cast that’s already a crossbreed of Rival Schools and Blazblue.

What really makes me wonder though is this shot of the ED card. The ninja’s stealthily hidden in the window getting a full view all the way down Kimi’s cleavage. I fear his mind will never be the same.

‘Final’ thoughts at the bottom.

‘Final’ thoughts:

There’s already a continuation announced for summer, so I’m not really sure about ‘final’ here. I guess I can say that I hope with all the character and world introductions now out of the way, they can focus a lot more on the characters and things actually going on instead of cobbling in backstory after the fact and having to explain one thing after another. One of its biggest weaknesses was that it got distracted far too easily into exceedingly dry ramblings about world politics or people’s abilities which were barely even tangentially connected to the big thing of the series, Toori getting Horizon back and having her reciprocate his feelings. Putting together a better stable of antagonists would also help. The pope was never much of a threat at all. The Spanish portal baseballers are already more threatening than him.

All in all, I think it’s worth watching if you can make it out of the fairly dull and semi-pointless early episodes. The cast is what made me enjoy the show so much with very few weak characters on the protagonist side and almost everybody being confident and positive in their abilities and decisions… not counting the flashbacks which were about 99% angst. That they all have their own interrelationships that the show doesn’t club you over the head with also helps. Less is more! Subtlety… good! *ahem* Anyway, I am looking forward to when it starts back up in the summer though. I’m just really really hoping it’s more like the second half of this season than the first.