天下制覇

I guess today’s a bad day for main characters on all shows.

Impressions:

I can see why A-1 was leery about airing this. It’s like it was written around 1940 when there was actually any real question about what happened with the Mukden incident. The only real confusion nowadays is whether or not it was just some Japanese hotheads or direct orders from higher up. Anything beyond that is the realm of conspiracy theorists. That’s not really too important though because this is based on the actual incident only slightly more than Koihime is a strict adaptation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Hell, they could have said that the whole thing was actually a meteor crash that woke up latent psychic heat beam eyes in sheep. That would at least be broadly consistent with the show’s mythos and couldn’t be any worse than the cat episode.

This episode’s biggest sin isn’t the historical revisionism, but the fact that it was boring as hell. I’ll say it again. In a show about spies, intrigue, and psychic fighting, why the hell would you call a time-out to waste an episode on a bunch of random talking heads wringing their hands about politics? The thing about intrigue is that it needs to be intriguing. Political yammering can be interesting. Just watch the British Parliament some time. They’re awesome. I think they may be the only political body in the world that considers a well placed "Yo momma" joke to be a vital part of the cut and thrust of debate and they compete to have the most ostentatious announcements for roll call. Twenty minutes of what essentially amounts to a fake History Channel special is the opposite of that.

The main characters didn’t even show up this week. At all. Umbrella girl got about ten lines, and the remaining 22 minutes and 30 seconds was spent on dull political discourse between a bunch of characters we’ve never seen before and will probably never see again. No matter what the show, no matter what the content, blowing an episode halfway through on new characters introducing a new plot currently having nothing to do with the protagonists is terrible direction at best.

Preview:

Oh, now we want to look at the main characters?