天下制覇

This episode was weird.

Impressions:

Apparently we've found where Daida's line supposedly is. Sure, he'll take orders from an evil mirror to murder family members, follow the mirror's orders into a basement filled with frozen monsters and masked cultists, watch them grind up his father infuse the remains with dark magic to create an evil phoenix, behead it and make a second darker potion infused with darker dark magic, but drink it? What do you think he is? An idiot? And if it seems like I'm making a big hullabaloo out of that, it's because that whole potion creation routine consumed half the goddamned episode like Iron Chef: Alchemist Edition gone wrong.

The other side of the episode is a somewhat less strange hodgepodge of things. Bojji was saved by shadow-dude, who was responsible for all the weird things last week, which you'd think would have been connected to that episode rather than an exposition dump five minutes into this one before both left the episode entirely to some random gas. Oh, did we mention that wasn't a volcano at all, but just a mountain that occasionally shoots flames, but also has people living in it and a stairway to the bottom? Curse people, with curse powers. Yeah, seems logical. They kidnap him. Meanwhile, the blondies have it out, but it's mostly Blondie-Prime declaring he must pay for his own crimes and then cutting his own hand off out of spite. Have I mentioned yet that this episode was weird? But still somehow doesn't compare unfavorably to the writing of the rest of the season.