天下制覇

This does not appear to be the action packed episode I was promised.

I have some social stuff this morning for a few hours. I had only ~10 minutes after this popped up. Enough to cap, sort, and post, but not to watch. Post to be filled in later. No similar skeleton Symphogear post will follow this since I'll be gone before it even airs.

Impressions:

After an episode of setup, promising a big battle, what we really needed was another episode of setup. So let's start a bunch of battles, interrupt one of them with a flashback explicitly explaining why it's totes serious, and then just drop it entirely and move on to something else for the remaining half of the episode. Why the hell not? Seems like a good way to tell a story to me! And action? I think you mean projectiles flying from offscreen. Because that's what every single 'fight' was. Whether it was Lancer vs Lancer, which consisted entirely of spikes popping out of the ground, until one of them hit one in the gut, but didn't do anything because MAGIC, or just the various characters raining down hails of arrows onto a Servant, skeletons, or people. Boy, do I never get tired of hails of arrows. I think there were maybe three incidents of 'attack' that couldn't be described as "a bunch of pointy things rain down," and they were all explosions, two of which were explosions to STOP "a bunch of pointy things."

So no, it was not a good episode. It did not deliver on the big fight that was promised, and continued to bounce around between characters and stories within the episode, not actually going anywhere or doing anything with them, just kind of noting that they're there, and making the halfhearted suggestion that maybe next week… or next month… there might be a little more substance. To what? Who knows. I couldn't even tell you which fights I expect would finish next week of the about four that started, if any. Maybe we'll just cut to the end. Maybe we'll just get some more flashbacks. Maybe the castle will continue to sort of drift around. The suspense is not exactly killing me.