天下制覇

I’m starting to think I should just be skipping the first eight minutes of every episode.

Impressions:

Well, then again, I would have missed the exceptionally bizarre pre-OP sequence featuring a mech breaking an egg of water over its head to instantly cool off its entire system, enabling it to defeat the man flying a bull head. I guess the rest of the first third was supposed to alert us to the crazy glasses girl being important. I’m not even sure if I should’ve recognized her before this point, but you know me. I still haven’t remembered the names of most of the characters and don’t particularly care to. Anyway, she wasn’t really relevant except as a floating corpse at the end anyway for another character who hasn’t done anything worth remembering him for yet to look horrified over. Am I supposed to feel shocked or bad about that? Or surprised when she comes back to life next week as practically every character in this show is wont to do?

Anyway. Yada yada yada, things actually start happening around 8 minutes in when Elf boy stages a one man takeover of the entire school beginning with the home economics class and a girl in a pillow fort, which as you know are the brains of Japanese militarized high schools, and assisted by them all being completely incompetent, but his ex-buddies trying to kill him. What I’m confused about is where Haruto got a gun from. Did someone actually trust him with one? Since the baddies have an unlimited number of ships and the world’s fastest R&D department, they attack again, defeating Saki with the power of widgets, but lucky for our heroes, they had forgotten that they have two mechs, letting Haruto-as-Elf mob them up as effortlessly as ever, after which, he discovers an old photo of a girl that, like everything, makes him start crying. Whew. That was close For a few minutes there, it was making at least tenuous sense. We sure dodged a bullet there.

Same ol’, same ol’, more or less. The way it swings around character deaths, even of named ones, has long since stopped having any effect, and the main thing that it still stands out by doing, is doing anything. Nobody can accuse this of having nothing happen an episode. Sure, it’d be nicer if it actually made sense or followed any kind of logical progression from point A to point B, but with most shows, especially this season, setting up camp and resolutely digging in at point A with nary a glance or sign of moving, something’s certainly better than nothing.

Next Episode:

Sad boobs.