天下制覇

And Kitamura manservice.

Impressions:

A very satisfying episode all around. Taiga needs to spend more time in a ponytail and Ami needs to spend more time lurking in the shower and teasing Ryuuji and Taiga. Minorin and Kitamura were a few leagues off the shore and into the ocean of weird this episode, which is a little bit charming, but it was a bit excessive at the start as they flailed around wildly in the train station. Kitamura brainlessly wandering into the kitchen naked was also a bit hard to swallow, and him dropping the towel was just a little too… well… I don’t know if I want to say cliche or ridiculous. I knew the towel would drop. Dropping towels are an immutable fact of all anime. If there is a towel, unless it is important to the plot that it stays up, somebody is going to end up naked. On the other hand, he just sort of let go of it and exposed himself to a room full of women and Taiga. I personally suspect that he was inviting Ryuuji to check out his goods.

Ryuuji’s dream at the start with Taiga being a dog was also good for a chuckle or two, but felt like it was very much just a throwaway joke and an excuse to put Taiga (and his mom) in dog ears and a tail. Maybe the scene’s a fan favorite from the novel. Whatever. *shrug* I’m not sure I’m really on board with the whole "harass Minori senseless" plan that Taiga has concocted, and they seemed to be cocking it up majorly through the first half of the episode since Kitamura and Minori were off together most of the time, but both pairs did get a little alone time at the end. Ryuuji sort of made an effort to find out if she was interested, but she started rambling on about ghosts, which leads into next week, where assumably, Minori and Kitamura (the only two not in the Blair Witch scenes of the preview) screw around with the others some more.

Preview:

Blair Witch Project.