天下制覇

Sweet! More flashbacks! In the middle of a fight!

Impressions:

There was a lot of bluster through the first half, but kind of an uneventful episode honestly. Izumo died and Alicia went from being in a coma to being crushed, so… not a huge change there. Of course, spending a bunch of time on Andy revving up to go get Mix back, spending about 60 seconds on that on Altair before just completely and utterly forgetting about it for the rest of the episode probably didn’t help. It does bear mentioning that the reinforcements got to Altair through a hole that Andy blasted in a vision of Mix’s cleavage. SYMBOLISM! But as I’ve said… repeatedly… Japan, stop cutting away from action and/or what should be emotionally charged scenes to plot dump/flashback in futile eleventh hour attempts to give characters backstory and motivation.

So yeah, the big event I guess was the flashback about how… Izumo is Amata’s father. I guess there’s supposed to be some parallelism between him turning his back on Altair and Kagura’s earlier rantings in the episode that the planet doesn’t matter as long as he has his woman, which would’ve been okay coming from Amata (although that would be completely rewriting his character to one with a pair of testicles). Coming from Kagura, who is a mass murderer and has repeatedly expressed his desire to kill Mikono and gnaw on her severed leg… I don’t think so. And then Mykage dropped a rock on Alicia right before Kagura killed Izumo. Mykage was using some kind of mojo on him too, I guess, not that he needs an excuse to kill people. And then as Izumo was dying in Amata’s arms, the appropriate symbols to cut to at this point were dragonflies mating. I don’t even want to think about that one. It is kind of funny that neither Alicia nor Izumo seem to care a whit about Kagura. You, Amata, are the symbol and embodiment of their love. Kagura on the other hand… we would’ve kept him locked in the attic.

Preview:

You need to stop trying to garner sympathy for Kagura, show. It’s not working.