天下制覇

Mmmm delicious dessicated corpses…

Impressions:

It is entirely too late at night for this much technobabble. Even for ZKC, this episode was chock full of some especially nonsensical pseudo-science, involving psychometers sort of quasi-living beyond the grave and taking over the body of a concubine shrine maiden because… well… the death thing gets old. I sort of tuned out when they got into the discussion of magical metal and the psychohallucinogenic field yada yada yada. Not my finest moment to be sure. I’ll probably get around to actually watching it at not-crazy-late-at-night on Monday or Tuesday and actually attempt retention that time. Between the magic metal, the hallucinations, and the undead, I think my mind stopped accepting new information and went "whoopie! Shiho with a sword!"

At any rate, the important part is that Shiho was all kinds of awesome this week, even without going into psychotic mode. She got some rare glomp time on Minamoto’s head for one. The psych field turned them all into teens for two, and giving her a sword was just overkill. I really doubt her prowess at using weapons through psychometry, but hey, I’m not complaining either. They did show Minamoto having another brief vision of Caroline again, but looking ahead to upcoming episode titles, it looks like they’re covering that right after Black Phantom, so we only have another week of foreshadowing to go on that front. And of course, who can’t be happy about another Black Phantom encounter next week? Even if Tim Toy’s power is a little… er… weird.

PS, Shiho with a long, black, phallic cylinder between her legs has to be the most suggestive thing this show has done to date, even above and beyond Muscle Okama’s attempts to hump Kyosuke into submission.

Brief Brief Brief Summary:

The powers that be are unhappy with the Children’s progress on the Devil/Angel front, but Fujiko has a plan to reform them. It involves a prince whose family is all about the level 7 espers, but they’re quickly attacked by a girl at the palace. Turns out Fujiko knows her, but she should be dead. Actually, she pretty much is, but thanks to the special setup they’ve got, her powers live on (along with most of the rest of the ancestors) and she’s possessed the prince’s flame. She challenges the Children, and they take her on in a special field that affects espers right in front of the ‘dead’ woman’s grave, which appears to age them a few years as they go in.

Fujiko refuses to join the fight because of the field, but when Kaoru takes a hit, Minamoto steps in and sees that her wound is just a hallucination, as was the Children aging. The prince, meanwhile, is just using this as a distraction to take out the old hag once and for all. Kaoru’s taken some of this personally though, and ignores Minamoto in her battle of wills, but they eventually figure out that they need to the old woman and all the… er… other dead women… off their game, so Shiho and Aoi snuggle up to some of the totems while Kaoru has to use the same sexually harassment caress that Fujiko used earlier to take out the leader. The prince tries to knock over the grave in the opening, but just takes an Aoi arrow to the turban. She does relent and lets the prince and his woman play tonsil hockey while the Children glomp onto Minamoto, who imagines Kaoru as Caroline as she leaps onto him.

Preview:

Black Phantom takes BABEL on directly.