天下制覇

Why must the pudding suffer?

Impressions:

A fast-paced episode where the characters finally realize that they need to get down to business and figure out this Penguindrum thing, and when Ringo hands over her diary, they immediately rush off to give it to their insane Penguin Queen to find out what’s up with it. Oh wait, no. That’s not the protagonists, that’s the antagonists. I get those confused sometimes seeing how one side is actually trying to fulfill their goals and the other doesn’t seem to care much if members of their family live or die. And like usual, everything important is tucked away in the last 90 seconds or so. Granted, that does mean that significantly more goes on this episode than most, but the vast majority of the episode is still spent with the main characters doing little more than shuffling their feet, which remains a severe issue plaguing this schtick. It’s hard to even think of a way how any of the previous Ringo episodes were leading here at all.

So, let’s start where we ended two weeks ago. After learning in the opening minutes that Shouma’s injuries have been instantly healed by the magical powers of Japanese bandages, he’s then unhealed by the magical power of being poisoned via his pudding and stuffed in a box, bringing us to a situation where… Shouma is heavily injured and missing. Again. But this time used as a hostage to… get Ringo to hand over her diary. You know, they could have just shown ol’ Head Explodey driving the truck instead of the recycled footage at the start of the episode and then skipped the next ten minutes.

The episode does pick up significantly after the halfway point, but is still more into simply surreal for the sake of surreality than anything elucidating. After being somehow thrown to the ground by a slingshot hitting a music box a few feet away from him, Kanba Kamba goes on his own drug-filled trip through Penguinville while a voice yells at him to remember. And if there’s nothing that makes a story better, it’s amnesia! And so we come to the last 90 seconds, also known as "The Only Part Of the Episode You Actually Need to Pay Attention To"^tm, with Explodey holding a gun slingshot to Kamba’s head, but kissing him instead of shooting him (boo), which was only a liiiiiittle bit dulled by cutting away from them to the two penguins kissing, having sex, or greco-roman wrestling, it’s unclear. Then she leaves to reveal that she’s taking orders from the flashback kid who is also a Penguin Queen King. Which in the spirit of the show, means that I doubt we’ll even see them again until October.