天下制覇

What in the ninety-seven hells, fifty-two abysses, and four thousand nebulae was this episode?.

Impressions:

Did the staff get tired of making drek and decide to just reboot everything? It begins in medias res with Papika wandering a desert, only to be taken slave by jawas. The tusken raiders attack them for water to pour on their dicks, led by a now berserk and trigger happy Cocona in a cursed mask, so they get into an over the top Gainax fight until Papika breaks the mask and they're reunited… except that it was all actually a plan by the evil alien BDSM queen who was posing as a jawa, so they transform into magic girl super sayajin extra pluses to defeat her using the power of mashed potatoes and a giant vagina cannon. Except that they fail, and have their asses saved by the interdimensional power rangers, led by her IRL bestie, who take the magic widget and wander off to their secret Terminator lab and/or Ku Klux Klan.

Why the hell weren't the first two episodes like this? Still nonsense and insane, but for the first time, it actually ran with it and really indulged in the crazy-ass fantasy world. It did drag a little at the start and middle with some dumbass exposition, and the moral lesson at the end about how much they like each other was dumb, but the rest was nonstop craziness that really worked well with the visual style. The whole thing bled oldschool Gainax in a way that the previous episodes have only teased so far. If the rest of the series can stay on crazy-adventures in crazy-land, things are looking a lot brighter going forward.