天下制覇

Dororo slapstick killing a bunch of dudes vs Flopsy the Land Shark for 'best' moment of the episode.

Impressions:

This episode would've worked about ten times better if they reversed the order of almost all the scenes. Start out with Hyakki being hounded to the island by Kool and the Gang, leading to a climactic fight with the megashark and then an emotional reunion between the protagonists. Hell, they could even not find the gold at all, showing that friendship is more important than looking for it. It would've been sappy as hell, but it would've been something. There would have been a start at the beginning, a fight that escalated from a couple dudes hopping around to a big floppy land-shark, and then the (supposedly, but not really) emotional bit at the end to tie a ribbon on things. I suppose at least being an action oriented episode, the terrible writing didn't get in the way as much as the episodes where they struggle with the moral conflict of whether it's okay to stop mass murderers, but that's not saying a lot.

Instead, the big fight and reunion comes at the very start of the episode, so they have to try to pretend that Taho's little gang of sub-midbosses are a serious thing, and we grab just as much gold as we can comfortably carry before scampering off back to whatever the hell it was we were doing, angsting over whether or not it's okay to stop serial killers, I guess. Despite this being the culmination of nearly a month of episodes, it's all rather fillerish. The overarching story antagonists pop up like Team Rocket and do nothing but supplant the Team Plasma bandits as ineffectual thugs on the scene, and the treasure is unceremoniously found and subsequently ditched without there being anything special about it at all, making it the second or third buried treasure they've found and then shrugged at. Not even a letter from dad or anything, guys? Everybody story-relevant conveniently pops up in one spot to go "rarr!" at each other, and then breathes a sigh of relief as they go back to the status quo.