天下制覇

Both in nipple count and in actual content.

Impressions:

Hm, an episode in the rather classic Lupin style. Everybody’s out for the valuable/girl, who is apparently both super human by the way she leaps out of crashing cars and gets sent careening forty feet into the air when Jigen runs into walls, as well as severely mentally handicapped. I’m not entirely certain why they had to go from simple damsel in distress to… that… but somebody should’ve probably told the musical director. While Lupin was doing schtick on screen, he was just banging around on the piano, probably with his forehead. The ending was also a bit corny and I’m not really sure what they were trying to do with it. Lupin sends her into a PTSD shock, so she attempts to kill herself. Of course, using the toy gun that they spent a good couple minutes at the start pointing out, so that scene was… how to say… lacking any kind of actual tension, from both that and how Fujiko went right from murderous to suicidal with nothing in-between. Let’s try to actually sell crazy if we’re going the full nine yards to suicidal, eh?

I can’t say it wasn’t an improvement over most although there were certainly the usual problems of nipples everywhere, a budget that could definitely stand to be larger and having all manner of consistency issues in tone and presentation. She just shot people in the eyes last week and then murdered another, and this week she’s making security guards do a Looney Tunes dance by shooting at their feet? To say nothing of how the episode ended after that too. Fujiko’s surreal flashbacks are just getting more inane. Sure, you could say that it’s all rape metaphors, but as we’ve all learned in high school English, everything is a rape metaphor. An army of owlmen strapping her down and proceeding to poke at her with knives and forks just may be a bit further off from the norm.

Still, the episode was quite a bit better focused and purposeful than most, and apparently it’s settling down to actually have some kind of cohesion and direction going into the end. Then again, Okada takes to endings like a duck takes to being dropped into a grease fire. I’m not holding my breath.

Preview:

If you’re reading this, it means that I forgot to change the template.