天下制覇

  

Except Nightcrawler.

Impressions:

I don’t like the way they split this up. The first half pretty much completely wrapped up the rescue arc thing, leaving ten minutes to… reflect on it? Have bad, angsty, Azuma flashbacks? Have dinner with whose her face and end the episode on the weak cliffhanger of “here’s another mutant”? Wouldn’t giant wall of CGI snakes stealing the maguffin have been a better spot? At least it didn’t indulge in the flashbacks in the middle of the action like some other shows I could name, but they’re still trying to shoehorn in character backstory and motivation and pretend like it was always there instead of just… you know… giving them it through the story in progress. I also have a bit of a hard time buying Red’s abrupt crush on Magneto as the primary drive for her face turn. She could have been fine as a kind of Fujiko-like antihero. This blushing and rubbing herself on someone old enough to be her father simply for dropping a car on someone is unconvincing, to put it mildly.  

The action also still isn’t coming anywhere even close to the first episode’s standards. Most of the effort was spent on beating up the grunts, and it wasn’t even really that much effort. Kingpin as well, just punched the penguin and settled for being grabby. And… that’s it. He grabbed them and then got teleported away, at which point he apparently shut down until it was time to get kicked. Even Red getting beat up, saving her from which was the crux of her whole character turn, was almost entirely off-screen. At least they did the penguin eating fish-powers with a shark-fin (that’s a fin made out of a shark, not a shark’s fin) without a bunch of unneeded exposition, which one would think would go without saying, and yet I think back to a certain show yesterday which could not shut the hell up.