天下制覇

Well… at least those are amusing.

Impressions:

I wish that the entire show was like the last 2-3 minutes of this episode. A nice visual style, a blurring of reality and nightmare, and actual tension. Even right now, it’s not clear whether that was Natsuno’s nightmare or reality. That’s the kind of cliffhanger and feeling that this show needs to aim for the entire time, not just once every now and then. Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of the visual direction with the vectorized floor, but everything else about that scene was spot-on. They’re also doing a somewhat better job of Natsuno with his nightmares, but it’s hard to feel much of anything for the jerk being tormented by visions of a girl that he was happy to see die. In a normal series, these nightmares would just be pangs of conscience for being an insufferable prick. Besdies, he has his window closed (as they felt the need to show us over and over again… oh boy! Another still of his window!). Everybody knows that keeps the supernatural at bay.

Unfortunately though, it was only 2-3 minutes and the rest of the time, while the characters were not as intolerably stupid as always, the direction and budget hamstrung it. This was an incredibly cheap episode, full of people talking off-screen, flashback shots, and my favorite, random pictures of bus roofs or chimneys. The show has never been the height of production, but this was pretty embarrassing. Screencaps 43-61 are all part of the same dry dull medical lecture on the nature of the blood illness, not that you’d be able to tell since almost a third of it was random pictures of Natsuno or the scenery while listening to people talk about hemoglobin. Plus, you can tell he’s a badass doctor since instead of sitting at the table like all the conformists, he sprawls out on the couch. That was just plain gratuitous.