天下制覇

  

You’d think these girls would have gotten more use out of him.

Impressions:

I’m not sure what was going on with this episode. On one hand, they stopped ringing the doom and gloom gong, if only briefly. On the other hand, the new rival character they introduced was immediately relegated to comic relief. You’d expect the rival character to bring with them a little extra weight, drive, or importance that’s sort of lacking despite lipservice that this is totally to save the world, guys. Maybe this is just the subrival and an extra one (dressed in black, obviously) will pop up eventually.

Anyway, after quickly disposing of Mr. Tongue, nearly the entire episode was spent on shenanigans with a lesser focus on friiiiiiendship. There’s not even any real conflict between them. She takes things marginally… very marginally, more seriously than them, and that’s about it. They didn’t even go back into Spilled Watercolor World to fight a second thing to prove themselves and the power of friendship, working together, etc etc so on and so forth. A couple solo training montages, a little girly party, and that’s a wrap. It totally petered out at the end with no fanfare whatsoever. Yay friendship power! …Or whatever.