天下制覇

Half this episode was basically the Spiderman meme.

Impressions:

Oh boy, a flashback episode. You know how I love those. But as far as flashback episodes go, this one's sins were fairly minor. The question of what was up with Ushio and 'Ushio' is one well worth addressing, and there was plenty of fighting the shadows and being Proactive Scooby Doo Teens or whatever you want to call it. I also like seeing them having tried, but having completely screwed everything up, resulting in two and a half of them dying. Too often in anime, the struggle is even bothering to try in the first place, not picking themselves up after a catastrophic failure despite their best efforts.

That said, I think it was a pretty mixed bag. Granted, fighting the random shadow was the highlight of the episode, but I feel like they could've skipped basically everything up to the actual drowning incident. I'm also not a huge fan of them inventing a new hojillion powers for the shadows. I guess they can apparently use their hair as weapons too? And hide as little bits. And also bring people into their memories. But also attack each other through the memory hivemind? And disintegrate people? These seem like powers they probably should have been using. The being able to copy less (or more, in the case of why 'Ushio' is messed up) is a more interesting angle, especially with limiting how much 'Ushio' can now fix herself without being able to copy the original anymore. It all feels like they're leading up the shadows being a borg computer database, which is way more corny than just a swarm of chaos monsters.