天下制覇

All the better for a wankfest.

Impressions:

If last week's short bit with the Scotsman was fanwankery, I don't even know what you'd call this. You'd have to sprout extra arms and become some kind of masturbatory Hindu god with eight penises. Almost every second of this episode was fanservice, of both the nostalgia kind and the T&A kind, with an extra gratuitous bathing scene where it's revealed that Aki's blackness aren't clothes as I'm sure everyone assumed, but some kind of permanent magic ash or something. And then she fashioned a pushup bra out of some leaves and twigs, and since we're just going all the way here, a half ton of lipstick. Rebirth? More like makeover. It was obviously supposed to be Ashi walking in Jack's footsteps and seeing all the good he did, but it didn't make a lot of sense given the fifty year time skip, and her epiphany already came last week. Had it come before, when she was still skeptical, it definitely would've built better to her change, but after the fact? Just gratuitous.

I also really hate that the Rider, hereafter referred to as George, turned out to just be… well, nothing. George was just a pissy ghost, presumably some ancestor mad about not having enough honor. Not even something Jack was imagining. He was just being actually haunted by a passive-aggressive jerk, in addition to being metaphorically haunted by his inner demons, who actually said things before this week while George would just glare. And, it turns out, George just needed to be whacked with a sword. It seems like such an obvious Fight Club setup. Jack yelling about his failures and fighting some demon of failure that torments him, only for Ashi to reveal that it only exists in his head. But that all falls apart when it's Some Guy Named George.