天下制覇

Convenient how she stopped at one per protagonist instead of making a whole army.

Impressions:

This was mostly a pretty solid action episode, but a bit marred by a couple things. First, the number of times that they decided to rewrite Tenshi’s powers within this episode rivals some of the worst Star Trek technobabble exploits imaginable. I’m okay with the super magic "I can rewrite Tenshi’s powers in 15 seconds but HOW DOES THIS COMPUTER WORK!?" thing based on suspension of belief given all the other inane powers in this show (although why wasn’t the hacker the one doing it?), but then they kept taking time outs to explain and re-explain her powers for almost the entire first half of the episode. Of course, I’m also a little annoyed that there was no actual twist besides "accidentally made an evil clone. Oops."

Second, the whole suicide sequences was beyond even the usual level of terrible misplaced comedy for this show. I get the first guy. He’s huge. TK’s fine too. He has too much funk for any Japanese girl to withstand. Then they got lazy and just had people walk up to Tenshi, get stabbed, and that was how she was stopped. Nobody even had to grab her or try to restrain her. She just stabbed them and that’s the end of that. Overall though, it was a pretty solid episode, at least far more than most of AB! tends to be. No overblown melodrama coming in from out of nowhere. Also, TK got to dance in the halls, had I believe 5 lines (a new personal best!), and the action this week made up for the long bouts of technobabble. It would be kid of nice if somebody would actually die from one of these grievous wounds once in a while. So far, the only harm that’s come to anybody has been of their own doing, which sort of negates any real drama of these sequences.

Brief Summary:

After a brief clash, Kanade and her clone take each other out. In the nurse’s office, Yuri gives the whole rundown on Harmonics and EVIL CLONES before they all wander off to class and Yuri goes to modify Kanade’s powers. She doesn’t understand jack, but finds a new power using the surprising magic of using the scroll bar. She also links Absorb to Harmonics with a countdown, but they’ll need Kanade to activate Harmonics again in order to execute it. Too bad she’s been attacked and kidnapped, so they go chase her down.

They encounter a pair of evil Tenshis and figure out that the clone is using the old code and has made tons of them. The party sacrifices themselves to get Yuri and Otonashi to the original clone, who tries to use her ‘new’ magical power but is thwarted by the power of earplugs. Otonashi finds Kanade, has her use Harmonics again, but then all the data from all the clones surges into her at once.