天下制覇

What a shocking development this is.

Impressions:

Shockingly, the girls fight for about thirty seconds before faking fear and then running away. That would be the extent of the episode that can't be described by "People sit around a table, swirling their drinks and talking." The 'best' part is the grizzled old dude in the woods. He reveals that Yuliy's dad disappeared but there's a dark secret about it (so probably not really alive alive), so they leave, have dinner, and then come right back for the rest of the non-story, which is that the ark is bad juju. Shocking. Meanwhile, in vampireville, bad wine gives one of them the feral crazies. And… that's literally it. Mikhail grumps around and is accused of contemplating betraying the vampire cause by thinking about warning Yuliy? He's only done that about a half dozen times and attempted to murder Dad 2.0 last week. So, sure, let's ambush him while he's walking down a hallway on an airship. He was definitely up to No Good.

And yeah, that's it. The visit to Old Man McOldy is just a waypoint on the quest to the dog ark, and all he did was warn them "Hey, this big dark secret is big and dark." Yuliy and his hanger ons all offer up mindless platitudes about how family is important, and once again, it ends with the promise of a miniboss fight with nothing at stake, so about equal odds that the midboss will just wander off or die ignomiously because he's already gone from irritating comic relief to written out of the show. Let's say we skipped this episode entirely, and Tex just took Yuliy straight to the miniboss fight. We would've missed out on… the hint that the ark is probably not sparkles and rainbows?