天下制覇

We really like drawing the moon, don’t we?

Impressions:

Well, that was kind of a disappointing end to both an arm being chewed off and to the Nephy. Hibiki just grew a new one out of dark evilness, and apparently this will be the impetus for re-entry into the "having magical stuff embedded inside you is probably bad the health" side of things. I don’t see her turning into the Lizard any time soon though. Ideally, you’d think this would be where they really sell it by Hibiki losing her crap completely and starting to endanger everyone around her, letting the rivals step in so all this talk of hypocrisy actually works a bit better when they’re defending people instead of pretending like there isn’t mass-child murder taking place in their backyard. Maybe they will do that next week with her transforming in front of her friends, the stuff inside her getting worse (or so they say), and a chip on her shoulder against Dr. Evil. I was hoping/betting on cyborg arm and/or one or both of Chris/Tsubasa being the ones to lose their crap for this week though… aaaaand was under the impression before that everyone already knew about Tsubasa too, so my predictions haven’t exactly been great.

The flashbacks into sad past also seem more than a lot tacked on after spending a season and a half of her having a generally happy and normal life with a bunch of friends. Is having arms chewed off, fighting moon monsters, fighting other magical girls, and having a piece of someone who gave their life to save you embedded in your heart not enough that we need to essentially retcon that in too? It’s bad enough that they keep dangling the real meat of the show, the magical girls vs magical girls, just out of reach. We all know that’s what the climax is going to come down to, and so far, the interactions between them have been kind of laughable. The gnawed off arm could have been a way to start bridging the gap, but Maria of all of them seemed to be the only one particularly upset by it, and it was pretty much undone anyway when it just grew back and Hibiki was back to normal once the adrenaline and black ink wore off. Besides the wall of exposition about how she wasn’t, of course. Because, as always, tell don’t show is the best approach for that kind of thing.