天下制覇

Couldn't we have just gone with the hearing thing, as little sense as that made?

Impressions:

I told myself I would just finish this episode to close out the arc, not expecting the arc to be finished about six minutes into the episode and after a quick montage, moving right along to the next one. You couldn't have shaved off five minutes from one of the three ploding episodes to not end up with a five minute spillover? The budget woes weren't as godawful as last week too, but that could also be because there were only about two pieces of 'action' that needed to be animated, and one of them was jumping around with really lazily drawn light-fire bouncing about. And even that devolved into stills multiple times. I also enjoyed that Kei did the whole "don't trust your eyes, use your ears" thing, but then his latent force powers kicked in (possibly because there was nothing to hear other than fire raining from the sky), said "your ears suck too" and he spontaneously learned just enough magic to take a blind shot to I guess somewhere not vital. But wait, there's more. They chased the dude off, but then had to have a moment to go "Wait a minute, this hasn't fixed anything." The bad writing got worse from there, as it turns out that what made the fairy so special is that she was a personal friend. That's it. That's the big secret kept guarded for a month of episodes. Luckily, the fairy was also happy to kill herself, which fixed everything. Yay, friends! What a satisfying ending.

So hitting the reset button on the whole goddamned thing at about a third of the way into the episode was likely the best possible thing it could've done. Of course, if it actually wanted to get started on fixing things, it would've jumped into the stylish high octane adventures promised and still unfulfilled by the opening. Instead, they reviewed the show's premise, stood around a coffin for about five minutes, and beat up a handcuffed cat-person for asking for a lawyer like an even pettier Dirty Harry. So much for her being the noble do things honorably and by the book character, eh? Anyway, the vampire-looking corpse in the vampire coffin dressed like a vampire ended up being a vampire. Not entirely sure why nobody considered that a possibility from the start if it's such a common problem that she immediately knew what was up, but sure. We'll go with that being a surprise.