天下制覇

  

I’m pretty sure that this episode was illegal in Canada.

Impressions:

Meh, Thursday afternoons. You are doing nothing to endear yourself to me. Well, this isn’t abjectly bad, but it feels like it’s in the completely wrong genre. This whole setup could actually make a kind of creative mystery/puzzle thing, where the baddie mucks with some word at the start, which starts having a more and more pronounced effect until they figure it out, resolve whatever issue has arisen between characters because of it while simultaneously giving the key to beating whatever the monster of the week is. It’s formulaic, but a tried and tested formula. And it might soothe over how messing with a word just spits out a montage of random things, and this week’s “dream” stuff was especially random. Instead, we mostly have faffing around until the bad guy gets around to trying something, it immediately makes everyone convulse, then they hop into their magic mechs, travel to the CGI world, and beat whatever random pre-made model someone pulled out of the CGI folder, maybe having to grunt and say “Try harder!” once along the way.

At least Maia is still wandering around, squirting things into people’s eyes out of spite, the exposition dropped off a little bit, and the Golem is still being half used for gags. And, of course, the aquariphones. It’s so rare for a Japanese pun to just be tossed out there and then everyone to stare for a moment before moving on with only a slight comedic stinger. That’s more than I can say for Thursday afternoon’s other offerings. It also helped swallowing the squeaky eight year old to have her fake crap immediately called out by the golem, as well as all the idol crap shown to be her mother living vicariously through her before we even hit the halfway point. Not that ballet is hugely different, but still. Annoying regardless, but could have easily been worse.