天下制覇

Who could have possibly seen this coming besides everybody?

Impressions:

Oh boy, an entirely flashback episode. You know how much I love those. This one was entirely on Jin's backstory, and it's not even full of twists and turns. He was experimented on by Dr Crazy Snake, recruited by the evil empire, sent off to protect Sawa's village from Snakey McSnakeface and monsters in general, then immediately changed to killing them all right as Team Snake showed up. The only big twist here being that there was a village of helpless idiots with widely desired and known superpowers and frequent monster attacks that was also somehow hidden, except from the government. It's not even like Janome was a one man operation either. The informational security of that massive compound of human torture is quite impressive.

And… yeah, that's about the sum total of the big reveals here, that Jin killed her village, not Janome, literally minutes before Janome's goon squad arrived to… also kill them, but more horribly. I think that's how you could have salvaged this episode; spent less time on the domination porn aspect with the emperor, and had Jin actually try to stop Janome's attack on the village until he became increasingly desperate to save them from the suffering that he was put through, and so he mercy killed them. Instead, we get a vauge "they're coming, uh, sometime" and he leaps straight to genocide, but sheds a single corny tear, and then abruptly changes his mind partway. Back him into a corner and force him to make an emotional choice. It was missing the frantic, anguished, hopeless despair that would make it actually tragic instead of an almost silly shedding of a single tear as he mows down old people and children.