天下制覇

I bet they lost because of split ends.

Impressions:

Before I even turned this episode on, I wondered to myself what it could possibly do to end on some sort of high note. There's absolutely no character arcs at this point. The relationships between the protagonists and antagonists is barely more than two grumpy neighbors shaking their fists over a fence. The only 'challenge' to overcome with the plot is handwavey magic pulled straight out of the ass. So that leaves, what? An overproduced dog fight interspersed with an overproduced pop idol concert? For about a minute, that looked like what they going to go for, and then things got stupid. Using the power of plugging their hair into a magic machine, Mikumo connected everyone in the naked astral dimension. And then they decided "Hell, this seems like as good a time as any to resolve this romantic triangle that we never really properly introduced, developed, or paid any attention to."

And so with a shout of "Our feelings!" they overcame the naked-hair-astral dimension, hugged, and sang some more godawful songs, as well as the OP yet again. The end.

Final Thoughts:

I'm running out of ways to say that this went nowhere, did nothing with anything/everything it introduced early on, and did so very, very slowly, squandering the somewhat above average (at least for this season) production… at least for the episodes that weren't 24 straight minutes of exposition. Not a single character had even the slightest bit of development over the entire six month run, the plot only 'advanced' through exposition and handwaving about things happening somewhere far away, and most of it was just to fill up some screentime anyway. Christ, you could've written Hayate out of the show entirely and literally nothing would've changed at all. This would've been a poorly paced three episode OVA. Not a single character was integral to the show, nor was anything that they did. So what was there to get involved with? What was there to root for?

About the only times it was palatable was when it was being willfully idiotic; overselling the idol fandom, shenanigans with the idiotic catseals, teenagers being the super bestest at absolutely everything. The story was tripe, the characters could've all been replaced by catseals without any loss of fidelity, and it even jettisoned the idol stuff for most of the second half. That's what I get for giving an idol show half a chance.