天下制覇

Magnets do not work that way!

Impressions:

This episode reminded me a lot of one of those RPGs trying to be retro; a Dragon Warrior or Pokemon, perhaps. One of the ones where King Malevolent tells the party that he needs them to retrieve the mystic orb, then the camera zooms in on his eyes gleaming evilly while he cackles with glee. All the foreshadowing here had that same level of subtlety. Not hinting at developments to come during the course of other seeming more important events, but being slapped in the face by them like a pie thrown by a very angry, very large clown. I know you can do at least somewhat more subtle foreshadowing, show. Vampire-boy got a handoff with some kind of assassination request near the start of the episode along with it nudging the audience "Hey, remember how this dude's an assassin?" Anyway, here's your usual godawful cliche about pretending to be boyfriend.

The rest of the setup though? Good lord. And this episode was entirely setup. Flashback dreams. Then a lunatic dude popping up to describe that exact dream and say "Yeah, but it couldn't possibly be the dude who looks just like him." It takes some real chutzpah from the writers to have one character say "Wait, I don't remember that ever happening" and then another explaining to them that they have amnesia. Then the lunatic turns out to be the head of some kind of apocalyptic death cult, living in supposed paradise, and the first damn thing that happens is that they start murdering each other in public executions due to some unnamed malady that only he can diagnose. Also, literally the moment he appears, people start getting afflicted with some other unnamed malady that he almost literally waves his hands in the air and declares without the shadow of a doubt he has diagnosed. Are these even supposed to be mysteries?  Why is there an entire episode pretending like it's not patently obvious what's going on?