天下制覇

I think someone missed the point of the books.

Impressions:

What an enthralling first half. A summary of the setting and everybody finally got into the same room. We're where we should've been back around five minutes into episode two. Fantastic work. And it only took half of this episode to do so, whereupon literally every character besides Book Girl more or less vanished from the episode. The rest was better, but still fairly underwhelming. The direction continues to be undercut by the frankly weird writing. They could've taken things a lot of ways, and at the start, I was expecting it to be a ripoff of Time Enough At Last with Book Girl purposefully isolating herself, creating the library/prison/cage to keep others out, and having to confront that, but no. That would've involved some actual introspection and a vague twist.

Instead, it spends a long time putting forth a really weird hypothesis about how Lord of the Rings was really about how badly Gollum just wanted attention, eventually leading to the big epiphany of "I want attention… also, the antagonist wants attention too!" And that was it. The end. The very first idea put forth is almost verbatim what the big moment is. And with that declaration, the crisis is averted. Never mind that Book Girl ran away from the guy trying constantly to help her. Never mind that the antagonist's tantrum began because he scared her by turning into a lifeless mannequin, thereby 'proving' that she was like all those other people who… are creeped out by mannequins? Even something like "It's okay to be alone, but we can be alone together" would have at least been a little more poetic than just parroting back what the dude had said about forty seven hundred times in the episode.