天下制覇

Uchida would definitely be more entertaining as a T-800. 

Impressions:

A decent episode, but definitely not as good as the first episode. A lot of Maya’s energy and the excitement was gone to make way for exposition, exposition, and exposition. The first two thirds of the show simply dragged to all hell. The gameshow bit didn’t work for Vampire Bund either, and even just a minute of it here was too much. I seriously cannot believe that they stretched out the Terminator/Time Cop/Insert Time Travel Movie Reference Here joke for four and a half minutes. A quarter of the bloody episode on something that we already knew to be patently false. It was horrifying to watch. I expected Maya to hit him about 15 seconds in, but it… it just kept going. The poltergeist of the week was also presented very well visually and atmospherically (and I don’t care if that’s not a word), but then they fabricated secret passages out of nowhere and it immediately died to blatant abuse of deus ex mechanica librorum, so I was laughing more at how poorly that was all stitched together at the end of the scene instead of impressed by any part of it. It should have also been set up at least a little bit instead of just popping up to attack Maya out of literally nowhere.

Unsurprisingly for A-1’s Anime no Chikara, The writing in general was just not very tight this week. Maya and Uchida teleport from the roof of an enormous school to the middle of a forest, somehow foregoing all intervening space. I’m okay with the idea of the phone that takes pictures of the future, ripped off from any number of things as it may be, but I really wish they had left that up in the air a bit more. When Maya used it to take a picture of herself and it showed her dessicated skull, good. That’s great. It’s creepy and while the leap to "future phone from the future" isn’t hard to make, the uncertainty is what makes a thriller thrill. However, they decided to beat it into our heads about three minutes later that that is indeed what the phone does. I say it a lot, but a light touch is a virtue. Don’t explicitly state something unless you absolutely need to. Show the audience, don’t tell them.

All that and I still haven’t said word one about Uchida. He seems… okay I guess. He was extremely generic this episode outside of his nearly 5 minute yarn about being a super agent and I feel like Maya being both his boss and student is just cheap gimmick abuse, but we’ll see.

Preview:

Yes, A-1, it’s funny because she has ‘kaze’ in her name and you made a reference to wind. Hilarious.