天下制覇

Maybe we can make it an honorary protagonist just so we can say the antagonists beat anybody at any point.

Impressions:

That's right. Now that the antagonists got their big power up and are a (massive sarcasm quotation marks) "threat", they're going to… blow up a rocket en route to completely losing their eighth? ninth? tenth? fight in a row. This is how we show that things are super serious, that in nearly three months of the show, one aspect of one of their plans finally worked out for them, and it only took turning into a giant robot dog and having a bunch of cutaway interior dog shots of crying to do so. These antagonists would have a hard time passing muster on Rocky and Bullwinkle. 

Which is also a way of saying that it was yet another exceedingly vacuous episode once you cut out the technobabble. We have to do the thing. We will stop you from doing the thing. Oh, a thing happened. Yes, you can use something like that to sarcastically summarize virtually everything, but this episode really did have no more nuance than that. The only character that you might be able to say was featured or focused on was Elsa, and that's just because she turned into a dog and cried. There was no arc here, within the episode or overall, let alone any actual character drama. And then at the end of it, they're quite literally randomly all teleported away, just cementing how pointless the rest of the episode was. The most you could say was it rehashed previous stuff yet again, like Vanessa and Hibiki once again going "What ever happened to getting along?" same as every single other one of their encounters, like one of them never carpet bombed a city in between any of the last three times they went through this.