天下制覇

Very stealthy and composed.

Impressions:

My patience has pretty close to run out on this one. While Dawn of the Witch is also slow paced and certainly dumb, there is a certain charm to its haphazard flailing and awkward fanservice, and its excessively long flashbacks invariably feature mutilation. The only charm this episode had was observing how part of the training to be clandestine assassins is to teach children to run screaming and randomly waving knives to frantically stab at things. That's basically the whole episode; an extended version of the flashback we already saw. So you know how she was trained by the crazy red lady? Well, she was trained at a school, and had a bond with the red lady. This is certainly something that needed ten minutes taken away from events in progress to explain.

Nor does it help that "events in progress" are not, in any actual way, in progress. They get to their destination and… take a bath. That's it. That's all that happens in the present this week. And in addition to the story coming to a grinding halt so it could spend most of the episode doing a needless flashback, the animation also totally cratered. So many close-ups of faces, eyes, and faces reflected in eyes. And when not that, establishing distance shots. Anything and everything to keep from having to draw too much, and especially animate too much, and by too much, I mean anything at all. Even drawing arms and legs was a big ask this week, let alone anybody moving.