天下制覇

That was likely the high of this episode.

Impressions:

Why are we spending any time at all in the holodeck? Why are we having a second episode of a random sideguy with no powers at all completely embarass the main sub characters? I'm also pretty certain that this is the first time they took Whose His Face from low key ninja to straight up ubermensch, and I haven't the foggiest idea why they would. Is next week going to have that random comms woman kick everyone's ass? I keep waiting for the "All is lost" moment to come where the antagonists actually win a single fight, but apparently that's only going to be the end of episode 10 or 11 as the cliffhanger before they pull friendship power of their asses for the obligatory final uber transformation 'cliffhanger' going into the last episode.

Anyway, this episode was centered on Shirabe having a sudden attack of the weepies. Not for any real reason. Hell, they didn't even encounter an antagonist at all until around 17 minutes into the episode. There would be about one fireball thrown before the third or fourth peptalk of the episode, and wouldn't you know it, but that's all that Shirabe needed and everything was all better again. Even the animators barely bothered to show up as the 'fight' was mostly just motorcycles/tops drifting down the world's longest straightaway with the occasional explosion or water exposion. Even for this particular season of the show, this was a distinct low point.