天下制覇

Just throw in an infodump from a narrator.

Impressions:

Well, it was more like episode 7 than 1-6, so it certainly could've been worse, but this was a mystifyingly poor episode. Could they really not think of any way to show Hyakki's blindness than by tossing up a red background and having a narrator pop out of nowhere to explain it? And then there's the giant centipede, which didn't make a single iota of sense. It's not ash rain, that's its skin when it molts, which means… wait, no, just drop and forget that. It's not leaving like usual because it's mad about what they did… except what did they do? Yell at it? Get pushed out of the way? Oh, and I guess now Hyakki can see it just fine. Wait, no, here's the narrator again to explain that he was using wood echolocation with a bow in the middle of a raging tornado to precisely target a screaming flying centipede… that he already knew where to aim the damn thing and never missed a shot, so I feel like we could've skipped a few steps here. Also, the girl is totally unharmed. Demon centipede stomachs are like an overnight camp. Even came with a change of clothes.

So much of this episode is just complete nonsense, and I didn't even mention how we get the kid-of-the-week's (non) backstory simply spewed out in the middle of a completely unneeded pause when the thing went away for just long enough to do that and only that. The episode probably would've been less of a mess had they put the centipede segments together, but it also would've been wrapped up in about 5 minutes with no real curveballs or twists at any point. Hey, there's a monster. Let's go kill it. Wait, I can't see. No, wait, I can. And it's dead. They probably meant to feature the echolocation and yelling thing more, possibly could've even worked in a "I trust you" bit with Dororo telling Hyakki to target her voice, but clearly the decision was made to focus on the Gau kid instead, so the challenge is relegated to just an offscreen narrator telling us that one existed and was overcome despite all evidence to the contrary.