天下制覇

What on god's green planet happened with/to this episode?

Impressions:

What a remarkably bizarre and terrible episode. Mostly the latter. I spent the vast majorit of the episode just being bored and thinking how much better things might've been had there been a timeskip at the end of the first arc for Sophie to grow up, learn how to fight, and maybe stop being just a Macguffin they're dragging around. But no. Apparently her job is to be comfortable in being useless, because she's trying her best. And this inspires enough confidence to give the same speech to others. Anyway, much of it was spent going through terrible 'reveal' after 'reveal,' almost all of which as alread unrevealed as the last. Monsters control the city, the humans there are kept in a state of decadent compliance, some mysterious super programmer has a master plan for TRUE EL DORADO, so on and so forth. About the only interesting part in any of it was the cyberspace bit where the animators decided they were done working for the day and let the artists draw whatever they felt like.

Then we get to about the last few minutes and things careened off the rails into a truckload of cow patties. We start by… Wait, did that random dude even have a name? We start by… uh… Wilbur McWilburson… declaring that he's giving Sophie all his data in case anything happens to him. Seems like a pretty clear death flag for a throwaway character. Nope! Never in any danger at all. Rides off into the sunset. Not even a 'twist' that he was actually an enemy agent. But these random data files, they're some subMacguffin for later, right? Well, maybe, but besides that, they somehow also give Sophie technopathic powers as well as suck her into some kind of cyberspace astral world with what we're supposed to assume is Sword's dead sister, now some kind of magical ghost in the shell. The best is when she uses them to turn on the lights, thus revealing that the entire goddamned building is full of Horrors, completely ignoring that Luke, highly trained magic super sniper, couldn't spot a single one anywhere just moments before because he was looking in the wrong places. Whereupon he immediately emptied out the entire building of enemies, aside from one, with a handful of pistol shots.

Next Episode:

…