天下制覇

Someone found some spare change for the budget.

Impressions:

A little late to be mixing things up, don't you think, show? I'm not counting Dragon's unceremonious dispatching at the start. That definitely should've come last week, and god only knows why it didn't. Would've made a far better cliffhanger than him doing recap. This was, by title and by Chinese zodiac numbering, supposed to be Rabbit's episode. Instead, we got Tiger's flashback and backstory. It was better than most, in that it had some form of character development (well, fall), but fell apart at the end with a very long philosophical monologue about mostly how dumb she got. Kind of missing the point there, guys, huh? It also apparently decided to put off Ox's part in her backstory until Ox's story.

Eventually, in the last couple minutes, when things finally got back to the present, it found its big boy pants and went all out with the animation for the fight, which was probably as impressive as it's been, albeit brief, and CGI corpsicles notwithstanding. Would that the same went into Rabbit's 'death,' which was just a splattering of bits. Not that I think the controller of the dead would be offed by something as simple as dismemberment, especially while his Monkey corpse is still wandering around, and especially without his own obligatory flashback episode. But the writing's been overall weak enough so far, with essentially no twists or turns to… well, anything… that expecting even a slight obvious one at this point almost feels foolish.