天下制覇

One of the lesser known psychic attacks.

Impressions:

I have to admit that this episode started poorly as far as my brain was concerned. I thought to myself "that flag doesn’t look right" and then deduced that there were 25 stars… and then, and only then, did I notice that the stripes were vertical. After that, I was subjected to the return of Mary and Ken and their accents and it felt like my brain was about to crawl out of my ear. Between this and Kyouran Kazoku Nikki, my Japanese was put through the wringer today and came out a wet, shrunken mess.

This was a really quality episode with another nice villain, one that could probably even give Kyosuke a run for his money. They throw out the red herring that Grisham is some kind of telepath, but he’s actually a mimic and can use the powers of other nearby espers. Kaoru was able to overpower him when he tried to block her by using her power, but that could just be Kaoru being her normal ‘special’ kind of Esper. A villain provides some direction to the show for once and a real reason to look forward to next week. Sure, there’s still no PANDRA, but we’ve got some crazy guy with a scar over his eye playing puppet master and Minamoto’s probably the best qualified one to take him on. He was smart enough to just teleport them all into a wall too. See that, Aoi? That’s what you should be doing with your power. Not teleporting carseats two feet above someone’s head.

This episode was also a delight because it didn’t contain a single use of Over the Future World as an insert song. I have to take away points for the Conmericans terrible terrible accents, but it gained a lot back by really pulling out all the stops for the background music in general here. I don’t know that I recognized a single one of the tunes they used which made the whole thing feel rather new and refreshing after the blatant insert song abuse for the last few weeks. There were a few good laughs to be had in parts. The ELEPHANT MINDCRUSH was a little weird for my tastes, but I did enjoy Mary insisting that she and Ken have a TEAM CONMERICA introduction to match the Children’s.

Brief Summary:

An emergency call goes out to all of BABEL’s top espers. When they assemble, it turns out that the emergency is from the Conmerican side of things. Somebody from their military has gone rogue/AWOL and is in Japan. JD Grisham is extremely dangerous and known as the Esper Killer, though they don’t have too many details as to what his abilities are except that they think he’s an extremely high level telepath. The Conmericans are going to be in charge of this one, since it’s one of their own, with BABEL providing support and backup. Neither Mary nor Kaoru are pleased with this.

They pretty quickly track him down, but he’s just standing by the side of the river. All the espers go undercover in various ways (except the Children/Conmericans) to be near him and they just wait and watch. The sun starts to set with him still just standing there, so they send Shiho to ‘accidently’ bump into him. When she tries to read him though, she’s blocked and he instead reads her mind and calls all the undercovers out into the open. He immediately sense the abilities of them and turns them against the espers. He blocks Natsume’s lightning and then uses it to fry her and all the mental espers in the area.

The Children and Mary get there as backup. Mary manages to nail him with a water dragon, but he repulses it and then takes her down with one as well. Kaoru beans him with a stone weight thingy, but he just falls into the river and is still fine. Grisham starts talking trash to her and uses the distraction to teleport all of them into the side of a nearby bridge and then puts an ESPLock handcuff on Aoi. Kaoru manages to break free from the wall, and succeeds in overpowering him, but he starts talking to her about the plight of elephants, stolen from their homes and how sad they are. Kaoru breaks down under the ELEPHANT MINDCRUSH and falls into the river.

Later, once they’re all freed from the wall, they manage to pull out his cellphone that he dropped at some point during the fight. Scanning it, Shiho senses that his target is a nearby dam. Minamoto’s not convinced in the slightest.

Preview:

Grisham’s diabolical plan rages onward.