天下制覇

Not a promising start to the serious side of Rei.

Impressions:

What an abysmal episode. Maybe it’d be better if you knew absolutely nothing about the plot of this particular arc, but the entire thing was spent on setting the premise. 30 minutes of "nothing went wrong," closely followed by Rika saying "this isn’t right… nothing went wrong!" Everything in this episode could have been covered in about 5 minutes instead of six times that. Hell, I covered the contents of this episode in the previous sentence. The remaining 29 minutes and 45 seconds of the episode are just listing the bullet points and reminding you why each little bit was important to the ‘real world,’ but can be summed up as "no Hinamizawa syndrome." You can safely skip this episode now and wait for the next one which will hopefully have something a little more interesting than "They’re alive in this world! Gadzooks! Nii-paah!"

Sadly, after the rather well done silly episode, the production for the more serious side was horrible. I can only take so many closeups of Rika’s eyes before flipping on the TV and wondering which crazy person Jack McCoy is prosecuting this time. Endless parades of talking heads are bad enough, but most of the dialogue here was Rika monologuing, so it was just watching unmoving heads. Re(i)na and Rika walking through the field also got dragged out far too long for my tastes with absolutely nothing of note happening visually. Hopefully next episode will get at least a little more interesting as Rika loses her mind a bit more instead of just narrating the premise.

Preview:

Rika and her mother.