天下制覇

  

Used to be that power was its own reward. Especially for grand viziers.

Impressions:

Precious little besides the flashback. Episode count is running low so they finally decided to invade the castle. Some particularly obtrusive padding with Dad filled an unfortunate few minutes, and I’m still waiting for Ema to serve a point. Females this season are having a particularly bad run of Plot Convenience Device syndrome. Anyway, I think what got me about the Big Bad’s punishment was how they just kept going on about how it had power. And I guess it runs on human blood? But mostly, it was just a widget that did… a thing. A widget so horrible that they dare not speak anything about it. I’m not even sure exactly what the punishment was. That he gets spots sometimes? Not often enough for anybody to notice, just at dramatic times, like when he’s deciding to spontaneously commit infanticide.

I mean, sure, punishing all his descendents is probably a step over the line. Although then again, it clearly didn’t stop him from breeding, so I don’t see the deterrence here. It’s not like it kept him from wandering into a random kingdom and becoming the grand vizier through the dark arts of medicine and military advice either. Maybe it was evil military advice and the cheerful benevolent king was secretly a vampire? Even setting aside the eleventh hour tacked on backstory, they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too with both starting out as evil, then being wronged (and doubly wronged) and going evilerer, but they didn’t commit to anything except killing babies . The whole thing would have made so much more sense if they started with him being talented, gifted, great nice guy, bending some rules/siphoning off a little orphan blood to save his wife or kid, and then getting uber-punished for it. Instead, he seems to get over his punishment immediately, it affects nothing about him, he leads a normal and successful life doing good, and then some temporary cosmetic spots bring on the full unjust horror of he and his descendents being like 99.99999~% of the population so he starts murdering babies. Eat your heart out, Iago.

Next Episode:

 

Is the whole episode just going to be this throwaway guy?