天下制覇

At least someone was having fun with this episode.

Impressions:

On one hand, this was definitely an episode made with minimal input from the writers and entirely for the director and animators to screw around, and given how godawful the writing's been so far, it's hard to call that anything other than an improvement. No sappy nonsense about belief in the the inherent wonder of magic solving everything, no dea ex Diana, no Akko using magic whatsoever and all the issues associated with that. You can't fall flat on your face emotionally or dramatically if you make no effort for either. That does leave things very hollow from a character and narrative angle, but at least it actually sold a fantastical world, unlike all the episodes so far just telling us about it before then focusing on the plight of Stephanie Meyer or a cranky dragon running Excel.

On the other hand though, without anybody reining the crazies in, the episode's more a rapidfire collection of random references and motormouthed patter than anything else. And by patter, I of course mean yelling. If this is supposed to be an introspective of Sucy, the ratio of signal to noise is godawful. It also kind of gave up trying to fit the style references in at the end and just had Akko sit down and watch a movie. You're in a metaphysical world inside the mind. Could we just make that the current thing instead of watching characters watch while they explain it? It definitely could've been improved with a little more structure and an actual start, middle, end to the story, and it really felt at the start they were going to use a kind of Wizard of Oz framework, but everything simply unceremoniously stopped when they hit the 22 minute mark. Time's up. Episode over. The end. Later.