天下制覇

Great. Exactly what I was hoping for.

Impressions:

I’m not sure what to think here. So pretending last week that Nyarlko et all had disappeared was just a "screw you" to the audience as Mahiro’s actually the one trapped in a world with literally nobody else populated entirely by flashbacks and recycled footage. I guess I should be happy it wasn’t just recycling episode three like how they sold it, but on the other hand, they spent half the episode on what was essentially a clip’s show. Screw that noise. The telling moment of his stupidity though was after walking through a completely empty city and trying to call a bunch of people and getting no answers, walking through an entirely empty school, he opened his classroom door and was shocked to find it empty. Seriously? But every single person in the world having disappeared doesn’t concern him as he just wanders around having flashbacks and screaming for Nyarlko. Give me a break.

And then the antagonist is the brat’s winged imp thing and its motivation du jour is wanting to know where to buy porn games. Which it then spent close to five goddamned minutes talking about, right after making the joke that nobody was interested in listening to him. Fantastic awareness there, Xebec. Then the generic cheap-as-hell team up of every single character on the show popping out of nowhere composed primarily of stills, yada yada, instant kill, giant explosion, whatever. Same old, same old. No surprises at the end.

Final Thoughts:

I almost feel silly thinking back to how I wish they’d tone down Nyarlko herself’s energy level after the sugar-high first episode where she was bouncing off the walls. Aah, heady times when they were making fun of overly long exposition, forking unruly aliens, crowbarring demons in the junk, and calling grenades CQC. A shame that show completely disappeared for a completely run of the mean half-assed romance ‘comedy’ for a good 9 or so episodes. Even the comedy didn’t hold up since everything was so damn formulaic. New thing happens, every character goes through their catchphrase, shocking twist that the –Cthulhu reference– is really a space –media thing–, and another episode… sometimes two… are in the books. 

So bleh. If it had kept up the creativity from the first episode(s) instead of being content to rehash the whole run, or even had actually given the characters the depth they needed to make the non-comedy parts actually work, perhaps it’d be a different story. But the comedy wasn’t good enough to stay funny and the attempts at tension and drama were jokes. After the start, the show’s happy to be just another in a long string of bland, repetitive, forgettable romantic comedies with the only thing that sets 90% of its episodes apart from a hundred other shows being lip service to Cthulhu. What joy.