天下制覇

The real final boss of this show… besides the writing.

Impressions:

Perhaps we should be grateful that it skips any pretense and just jumps straight to the Dude Of The Week being a mass murderer feeding everyone he comes across to the local nue. But then we get sucked into his flashback multiple times, and I honestly couldn't tell you why. He told the story about his mom getting eaten and killing people, now, ten minutes later, here's a flashback showing that and nothing more. It's hard to even see how it ties into the never-to-be-moved-past 'character arc' for Hyakkimaru where he accuses him of being a monster too right before dying, because… Hyakki was a better fighter than him? He wasn't scared? I know it can't be that Hyakki was covered in blood or merciless, because those have been the core two traits of 99% of the humans in this show. It's also a hard sell that Hyakki is 'empty' inside sandwiched between scenes of him increasingly frantic to save his Gal Friday's life.

And unfortunately, there wasn't much more to the episode besides that lazy backstory repetition. We got a bit at the start and the middle about how the Biblical plagues are visiting random villages, which is obviously Hyakkimaru's fault, but that's nothing new. Maybe they're slightly more plaguey now. There was also a kind of weird few minutes aside where Dororo talked about autumn, bereft of any connection to the man eating pokemon that they were about to encounter. I've long since given up hoping they were introducing some theme for the episode with it or that whatever is said will come back in an important way, and it didn't, so full sail ahead right back to where we were about 6 weeks ago. Maybe this time, Dad will do something other than stand impassively, but I'm pretty sure this ain't the last time we're going to see the demon fusing schtick.