天下制覇

What the hell was this episode?

Impressions:

You know what, I’m just going to assume that Lupin got juiced on LSD and we spent the episode watching his increasingly insane hallucinations. That makes infinitely more sense than… whatever the hell this was. Most of it was just sort of generic babble and flashbacks to how the drug stuff from the very first episode of the series was actually the main impetus for Fujiko’s stuff, but good god, it’s hard to take any of it seriously when it’s a character in what is ostensibly supposed to be at least mostly grounded in reality wandering in and out of other people’s dreams, and the past, with absolutely no explanation for any of it. I mean, I’m sure we’re supposed to take it all seriously, but I’m not sure why. I feel it’s best to just summarize the imagery to get how the episode went. The gist of the rest is yada yada, medical mojo, yada yada, MY DAUGHTER, yada yada OWLS.

First they decide to go with Lupin repeatedly waking up in some kind of bloody abandoned lab surrounded by naked mannequins. Next, it was revealing that the owl men weren’t just some weird imagery, but some kind of actual owl cult that keeps mechanical poisonous owl men in beds just in case people come snooping around. Then the owls were gas masks. Which I actually quite liked. That was pretty clever. Traumatic, and could be associated to a known similar childhood animal like owls… well… if not for the actual owl men apparently running around. Then after Fritzy shows Lupin around, explains how Fujiko’s his daughter, and has a cutaway explaining more of medical research gone bad, he literally just vanished and Lupin was suddenly in a completely rundown lab, once again pointing towards all this being his drug-addled trip.

Then after running into Zenigata, they’re ambushed by gas masks and he’s chased back to Fritzy… who now has an owl beak and is operating on Lupin himself. He stabs Lupin, who shoots him. Fritzy explodes into butterflies, then reappears as a human as Lupin crawls out of a hole in the ground. Fritzy gives Lupin a photo which sends him into a flashback of Fujiko’s past. By the time he wakes up out of it, he’s shot by a gas mask, who takes off the gas mask to reveal that he’s an owl and shoots himself. Lupin then wakes up naked and unharmed with pictures of naked child Fujiko and a ghost owl man.

Uh, yeah.