天下制覇

I almost wish he had a top hat and cape.

Impressions:

Like the last few episodes, Shiki is finally getting interesting, but it’s doing so by hurtling in bizarre directions. If you were hoping for a resolution to last week’s cliffhanger, tough beans. About half of this episode was Toshio and Ozaki just sitting around listing every single banal piece of data on the vampires. I hope you want to know exactly how much blood they drink, that they can’t enter unless invited, and their favorite color because you’re going to get them. Knowing every single piece like that just makes it harder to understand how they never came to the conclusion that it was vampires in the first place, or at least had someone stay up/monitor the patient overnight when everything was going wrong with them. And of course, after both seeing a vampire, their course of action is to sit around and wait for another night. Unarmed. Without asking for any backup or help. Great work, team.

The other half was more interesting, but similarly inane. The vampires launched an all out attack on the clinic, broke in, beat Ozaki up, and with a cry of "Vampires away!" all then ran off because it would ruin the plot for the bad guys to take out the protagonists after going to all the trouble to introduce themselves. All this to pick up a woman one of them had been gnawing on. Seriously, after two months of build up, the big ‘reveal’ that there really are vampires comes with one of them showing up and saying "Hi! We’re vampires!" Catboy also seems to have been hitting the gym pretty hard lately, or the animators forgot how to draw arms.

Regardless though, it was another step in the right direction for the show. It’s just continuing to have issues making the entire show interesting instead of just the supernatural portions. It does atmosphere well, it does not do exposition well, which makes its stubborn insistence on spending 2/3rds of every episode spewing out as much of it on the most trivial of details all the more confusing.