天下制覇

*gasp* An origami!?

Impressions:

I know I said this in the season preview, but after an episode, I still really don't know what to make of this. On a lot of levels. For example, the last two minutes of the show are an explanation of the premise, that there's ninjas everywhere, including pro-American ninjas who saved General MacArthur at the end of WW2 and the US was so terrified of them that they had them disbanded to ensure US global hegemony. But the actual start? A bunch of CGI black ops attempting to take down a terrorist only to discover him beheaded and "an origami", their words, left behind to show that it was the work of a ninja, which has left them all in fear and relief that they didn't run into the ninja itself. Note that despite how barely animated the rest of the episode is, there is virtually no other CGI. 

The actual episode is split between the past and present… future? Two timelines. One where they're on the roof discussing the ninja meta and how they're totally not but totally are but totally not a part of it. And the past where the dude is getting the mission leading up to that, which first involves day drinking with the first local loose drunk woman that he can find, but mostly complaining that he's bored, or explaining that he's a ninja. I think what it's missing is him doing some actual clever or ninja stuff. While Migi/Dali was completely over the top, had his lazing around and the like been shown to come together as an elaborate calculated master plan, it would've been a lot more interesting. But his plan was finding a drunk woman and asking her to drunkenly call someone to establish that she was drunk. Pretty sure you could've managed that with a tape recorder. It's not exactly MacGyver. So that leaves it… what, exactly? Kind of a very weird, very poorly animated… drama maybe? I don't get what it's going for, and I'm not sure whether or not I can say it would succeed on even that front.

Next Episode:

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