天下制覇

…The apostraphe’d new title is too silly to not use.

Impressions:

Well, at least it wasn’t an Inami episode. It was very obviously a re-introduction episode though. Every character went through whatever their primary thing was. Poplar’s small, Yachiyo’s oblivious, Inami’s annoying, Yamada lies with the casual aplomb of an incompetent serial killer, etc. It was a little amusing to see Takanashi Katanashi spend the entire episode obsessing over small things, a character trait that all but disappeared from him after the first episode of the first season. It was admittedly the only thing that made him unique at all. I’m not sure what its return means. Probably that A-1 couldn’t remember anything that makes their main character unique either.

It was an okay episode though, or maybe it’s just an entire week of terrible episodes catching up with me. I’ve never been a great fan of the show, but at least Yamada was always fun and Poplar could be cute at times. The episode had a lot of Poplar and only a little Inami, so that already made it better than most of the previous season, even if most of the jokes were fairly recycled and it was about 80% structurally identical to the first episode of the first season, just with the characters introduced afterwards doing their own little schticks in place of introducing themselves to each other. Unfortunately, since I know he has fans, the Claw had only a cameo appearance at the very end. Maybe next time.

And now, in case you somehow missed the message in the upper left corner displayed for the entire episode, to wait until October 1st for the show to actually start broadcasting (ie, episode 2 on the 8th).