天下制覇

That plane makes my eyes hurt.

Impressions:

The thing that gets me about this episode is the cutaway that happens at the OP. Dude and co is on a ship, attacked by the indistinct alien-but-not-really thingy du jour, saved by the human-plane-but-really-just-human girl thing du jour, then everything goes off the rails. He leaps into the water to rescue a seemingly perfectly fine plane in no distress aside from flopping into the sea. What were you going to do, exactly? She wakes up, kisses him, and then when we pick things up again, he's hundreds of miles away, waking up, possibly wondering what the hell that wet dream was. We wouldn't get back to damn near any of that until the closing seconds of the episode when he… shockingly… bumps into her again after being assaulted and kidnapped. And I haven't even gotten to the stealth sister character who apparently ninja followed him as he biked for miles and hours to the middle of nowhere, only to pop out and chastise him for being in the middle of nowhere. It's like there are pages missing from the script and nobody noticed.

I'm tempted to say that it's a particularly uninspired KanColle or Strike Witches knockoff, but even that may be selling it a bit too high. This episode never left Blando McBlanderson's side, and he's more of a light novel boy, complete with endlessly nagging little sister. He has some generalized beef with invading aliens for being invading aliens, but that's about all there is to that side of the story and/or his motivation. You don't need much, but he ain't doing anything with it either, unless you count being nagged at or kidnapped. If the draw is supposed to be the planes, there's not much of that. If it's supposed to be the imbecile magic girlfriend (judging by the next episode preview), there's even less of that. So what is supposed to be the reason to tune in next week?

Next Episode:

…