天下制覇

I can't see a thing.

I only made it about two minutes into the Three Girls thing. They spent a minute reintroducing the entire three person cast, and then a joke of "Have some food." "I couldn't possibly." "Have some food." "I couldn't possibly." Repeat about four more times, followed by shouted announcement that they're friends, followed by shouting that a cat exists, and cats are cute. I… couldn't take it, and skipping forward showed that things would not be changing, just switching to focus on a rival character for the blonde for the first half and then more prosaic crap with the blonde and her similarly airhead (supposedly even more) sister for the second with flashbacks and sisters are such friiiiiiiends nonsense. Gag me with a fork.

Impressions:

On one hand, this was easily the episode that they put the most effort into the production and probably the strongest episode (well, 22 minute chunk) of this so far. On the other, like sand in the salad, when it sort of stopped sucking at all the other things, that just brought all the other problems into extremely sharp focus and made them even more obnoxious. The first of the massive two is that everything is still so ridiculously dark. It's impossible to see what's going on for half of the episode, and only gets assuaged a little towards the end with the glow in the dark knight shows up to provided some desperately needed illumination. The second is that nothing can be done without having about three minutes of dialogue attached to it. They did a better job of including some visuals to go with it this week, but there were still constant interruptions to the action to go over and listen in to what the peanut gallery was discussing four feet away for minutes at a time. Hell, even when the knight showed up, they had to then flash back to explain why… after he made his entrance through the ceiling for god only knows what reason. Or maybe he attacked the ceiling? It's really not clear what the hell that was about. The episode could've been about 8 awesome minutes with better lighting and if everyone had shut the hell up. Instead, it's a constant stream of interruptions during a fight that's mostly impossible to see anything. 

Which isn't to say those 8 minutes were all cocaine and hookers otherwise. The antagonist apparently ascribes to the Flash school of fighting, and more than once decided to run in circles while the good guys randomly flailed around and they called that a fight. The whole knight's side of the fight was also done in this bizarre constantly fluctuating mishmash of styles, sometimes from Elsa's point of view, sometimes color totally washed out, sometimes everyone turned into blurs while the camera heaves wildly like it's in a tornado, etc. Our hapless protagonist's grand contribution to the entire episode was pushing someone out of the way, once. So he's still both obnoxious and unnecessary to the story, which is a fantastic place for any protagonist to be in. Then he got cut open yet again from one of those famous Japanese delayed effect slashes where they spend a few scenes walking around perfectly fine, take a few weeks off in Cabo, and then years later while working on the Chevy, realize they were slashed and keel over in a spray of blood for extra dramatic value, no matter how nonsensical, so it ended on another grand rolling of the eyes as well.