天下制覇

An episode that weirdly went nowhere.

Yes, I'm still alive. I've had a busy and stressful week, but after a ~4 hour drive tomorrow, things should be back to normal, and I'll make a concentrated effort to figure out what to do with this season to get at least two to three posts a week out.

Impressions:

So much of the episode could as well have had the tagline "…But did it really?" attached to it. A bunch of dudes died! …But did they really? Is this actually any different from the last time? But an important person died! …But were they really important? They had like one line to this point. And nobody else who has had any screen time got so much as a skinned knee. Whose-His-Face was pushed to the brink and had to use the forbidden power! But was he really? Or did they just say that he was and then that he had gotten stronger in -waves hands vaguely- some way? Then the super duper ultra last boss spawns and… they beat it by hitting it with the big fist thing, same as the first boss in the first episode, so was it really? And then we reach the shocking reveal that the last boss who we had no reason to think was actually the last boss, and were told wasn't the last boss, was not the last boss.

Which at the end of things, leaves us with a really weirdly uneventful episode. Everything that they spent the last ten minutes of last week's episode telling us would happen, proceeded to happen, with no surprises, twists, or… really anything along the way, and at the end of it, we're left at the same status quo where we began, despite the very half-assed one or two lines where they claimed unconvincingly to start that this would totally change everything… and even that was immediately taken back by the robot overlord exposition machines. Beating the super duper final final boss with the same lazy mech punch as they did the first boss is definitely a low point, but the whole episode was basically built on performative nonsense that it already undermined last week, and forgot to include another shocking twist to distract itself from… well, itself.