天下制覇

I’d have rather watched the girl auction.

Impressions:

I guess this show is gearing up to eschew comedy completely and wallow in seven metric tons of angst for the last few episodes, especially if the central point is the tired old Chobits "love results in pain, therefore, I’m deleting all memories" routine. There were some attempts, and the locked ‘sanctuary’ scenes were decent enough. I feel like they misfired with the peeping system though. Sugata observed all sorts of bizarre phenomenon at the start which they foreshadowed as Synapse about to do something, but all turned out to be due to Tomoki installing pipes all over the place to peep on everywhere at once, but they never actually delivered that punchline, leaving the gag jumbled up. The rest of that scene was the usual parade of each female member of the cast walking in on Tomoki’s plan, but instead of humor, it was just drama and more drama.

A little bit of focus would help things a bit here. Nymph’s been nothing but a giant ball of self-loathing the whole season, but to have the entire cast sans Tomoki and Sugata suddenly leap into the pity pit in a single episode doesn’t flow well at all. Need I remind you that Ikaros’s entire melodramatic meltdown is predicated off of one of Tomoki’s random fantasies too. In an episode and a half, it went from a gag to the raison d’etre for emotional suicide. Uh… okay? Apparently Chaos is back as well, and while I do think that she was underused in her first appearance, if it takes all of an episode and a for her to come back from her big dramatic defeat, that makes it a little bit silly. Also, what ever happened to that girl Sugata found in Synapse and Earth (Hiyori)? Did AIC just completely forget about her after her introduction?