Flamenco Girl definitely brings the punch to the show (even though Masayoshi can actually block punches now). She’s ridiculously violent, in contrast to Masayoshi’s passive-aggressive style of heroing, and comes backed with crazy theme music and a jazzy fight soundtrack. It would almost have been a fair contrast of methods, except she tazed a cop within 10 minutes of showing up. Considerably less cool.

(Though to be fair, he probably should have used ripple to defend himself)

To be honest, while Flamenco Girl’s appearance was a bit of a jolt to a show that been sleeping on the potential for a more serious plot, it more felt like it was replacing the awkward heroism comedy the show had been building up with a bunch of smacked-in-the-balls jokes that could only be the second best in a season featuring Hajime no Ippo. I like the notion of a hero who’s actually brutally competent, but that tends to crimp the more small-scale, episodic nature the show was going for. That brings in actual police involvement, as this episode showed, which *might* eventually lead to a Zenigata/Lupin-esque rivalry between Masayoshi and Goto.

…But it could just as easily suck the juice out of the comedy the show spent 3 weeks selling itself as. Right now, I feel like this show is struggling with its identity the hardest out of anything I still like this season. The opening wants it to be a passionate, hot-blooded parody. The first couple of episodes wanted it to be a heartwarmingly awkward comedy, sort of Tiger and Bunny without the reality TV. This episode wanted to be Kick-Ass without the mobsters. Unless you’re really good with your intro, building an identity takes time. Changing it takes more time. And meanwhile, lots of other things are fighting for your viewers’ attention. I’m still enjoying it, but I’d be lying if I said I knew what it wanted to be, and after a month into a modern anime, that’s not a very good spot to stand in.

Arpeggio really seems to be alternating its format week by week, going from battle episode to aftermath to battle episode again. It’s a format that makes sense for a series that’s packing 2 episodes per disk (some of the biggest selling point goes into every volume), and they’re liable to keep it up unless the ending shaves the time between battles down to nearly zero and turns every matchup into an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink shakedown like the one in episode 4. In which case the people who stuck around just end up getting more bang for their buck.*

The first half was mainly a refresher course on how the Kishi-Uezu-Iida power trio can do fun, energetic comedy. Perhaps the best part was the one where Takao got sent straight-up flying by a stray missile in a surprise bit of slapstick. Too, Haruna and Makie hit it off fairly well without taking too long to grind through dialogue, and Kirishima was more amusing as a bear than as a battleship. She blew her cover sky high by eating a carrot, and Haruna’s immediate reaction, from the the way she cut Kirishima off ice-cold to the look in her eyes below, was golden.

The other half of the episode seemed mainly focused on developing Makie as a sympathetic character en route to presumably driving the stake of emotional complexity into Haruna’s heart. Her backstory as a test-tube baby engineered for military purposes was fairly canned material, though it was a neat touch that they got the ever-versatile Koji Yusa to voice her dad. This episode outlined the show’s potential versatility, but I’m not going to miss the heavier drama when it gets back to high-stakes naval combat.

*I would do a weekly heat check, but things haven’t substantially shifted since last week. Just flip Non Non and WA2 and kick BlazBlue out of the top 10 for Strike the Blood. The more notable difference is in how fast Arpeggio has been gunning for Little Busters at #4; it’s been ranking in the top 100 of amazon Japan pretty consistently for the past week and a half. Which has resulted in a stalker Japan preorder curve for the former that looks like this:

While LB gets something that looks like this:

And Kill La Kill (currently at #3 with a higher total and more popular DVDs) looks fairly similar:

I still think it’s more likely that Arpeggio ends up as the 4th-6th best-selling show of the season, but if it ends up outselling Kill La Kill for what was likely a fraction of the budget, that’d be a hell of a thing.

Kyoukai no Kanata’s 6th episode was very heavily reliant one particular scene, repeated, many, many times. And, fortunately, to great effect.

I’m 100% behind an episode where the cast manages to fail in increasingly hilarious ways. In comedy, there’s a big gulf between the skill at which people can tell the same joke over and over again. This style of joking can go South real fast; when a writer is bad at repeating his or herself, you get a formulaic example of characters running through the motions, something that ultimately comes across as an episode that could as well be cut from the series. It’s the prototypical filler episode, and nobody likes it. But that’s not what we saw here; I had a lot of fun with the group’s attempt to take down the pus-spewing roof vegetable with eyecandy and sneak attacks that proved futile for a cornucopia of reasons..

When a good writer is repeating a joke, you get a rhythmic barrage of combinations, which might end the same way but feature a number of variances within, and above all get a little funnier each time. The final product is more the prototypical OVA episode that everyone likes. Whether that’s because of escalation or because of more subtle mechanics of a joke isn’t important. What’s important, if you’re going to tell the joke a lot, is to make sure you’ve mastered its nuances. At least this week, Hanada Jukki’s copy showed a firm grip on those nuances.

That, and it’s worth noting some particulars that dance scene at the end. Primarily because it did a great job of exaggerating the emotional investment of the main four while leaving the punchline (that everyone was dancing, so no one could go in for the kill) in broad daylight. But also because it was a particularly noticeable scene that saved on budget without sacrificing entertainment value. Look, KnK is going to go down as one of the lower 50% of shows on the market this season. But it’s worth noting that this tweak was as dynamic an attempt to roll with that as I’ve seen in some time,* swapping out a high-flash dance scene for a picture montage without losing much in the way of the overdramatic-comedic effect the scene was going for. Props to Ishidate Daichi; a penny saved is a penny earned.

*I’m assuming that it was, based on what I know about the timescales for anime production finishing about 4 weeks before their airdate. I could be wrong, but it’s a spitball that fits what went on screen.

There are a couple of primary rules to following modern anime that I’ve discovered since first getting into it in 2007, something I feel I should mention because I violated one of them last week:

1. Never count out a show before it airs. It doesn’t matter if the studio, staff, and source material are all seemingly dog meat, miracles happen more often than you’d think.
2. Dropping anything new after 1 episode is perfectly acceptable. Shows that don’t have a gripping intro in today’s ultra-competitive market are the ones missing a beat. If they don’t care about themselves, neither should I. The inverse is not necessarily true; a good first episode means a lot more than a good third episode, where the staff can afford to throttle down for the sake of a particular story because they know they have their audience.
3. 90% of all game adaptations are bad according to people who played the game. Not so much for manga, where plenty of anime staffers have gotten absurd amounts of praise for storyboards that were basically carbon copies of their award winning source material.
4. Don’t expect people to like or hate the same things you do. Learn to love the party going on around a show or just leave it alone.
5. Doubt Takahiro Omori, Kishi Seiji, Kenji Nakamura, and Taniguchi Goro, under any circumstances, at your own peril. Though they don’t always hit home runs, they can do anything, they’ve proved it, and they just keep grinding like they’re playing Dragon Quest and unmade anime are a bunch of hapless slimes.

True to form, Omori and writer Hideyuki Kurata didn’t take long to go from the introduction of Flamenco Girl’s clashing colors to weave her and the consequences of her actions into the larger tapestry of circumstances. Now she’s been humanized, the cast in general has matured, and we’re set with at least 3 or 4 new emerging plot and character threads that ought to keep things fresh perhaps even to the halfway point.

While last week’s episode had the definite flavor of watching a bunch of unknown plot elements being tossed out (Flamenco girl’s more violent bent, Masayoshi’s resulting disillusionment, Goto’s evolving role on the sidelines), this one brought them from a bunch of purely isolated threads into more of the classic dice-in-a-bowl setup; the guys are becoming much more aware of their role in this phenomenon (more on that in a minute), she’s taking some serious lumps as people used to street fights cotton on to her methods. The moment with the external jock straps was a great paradigm shift that way, and supremely ridiculous at the same time. To say nothing of how she dragged the rest of her idol unit into things.

Meanwhile, now Goto’s listenting to complaints about Flamenco Girl’s behavior, and Masayoshi’s pulled back from real heroing only to find out that even hero shows aren’t particularly idealistic. And both got some stimulus at just the right time (Goto’s girlfriend and the missing wallet, Masayoshi’s grandfather’s package) to start really evolving as a character. Now Masayoshi’s got new gear and a firmer grip on his principles, and Goto is owning his hero-hunter job by adding his own ideas to police policy. In all likelihood, one of those threads is going to get walked down the aisle and be the central focus next week. But who knows? This show is still a hard read, but now it’s a jazzy, dynamic hard read that introduced a remix of the Pink Panther theme and a police officer with the face of the biggest anime icon of all time. That’s something definitely worth keeping up with.

In all seriousness, if that’s not an official tie-in of some kind, it’s there because somebody on this staff is a really fun dude.

Though this week’s episode featured a battle about as explosive as the rest of them in the series, it lacked the punch of episodes 2 and 4. The main reason for that is that, while the first two battles were tactical affairs that featured Iona’s crew out-clevering a superior force, this fight consisted mostly of Haruna holding off ground forces with a nanomachine double and some magic force fields. And some scenes of Kirishima fighting as a stuffed bear; to be fair, that was a pretty cool usage of a character who was overacted in the first place.

This week also saw a wrapping-up of the mini-arc featuring Haruna, Kirishima, and Makie’s newfound friendship. The whole arc was pretty standard “aliens befriending humans” stuff, and I don’t have too much to say about that. It’ll be interesting, though, to see how those three mesh with Iona’s crew as they all head towards where Takao is now being presumably imprisoned.

This week Kyoukai no Kanata decided to start facing up to some of the loose ends it dropped during the Hollow Shadow arc. One of them, Sakura’s murky quest for revenge, was more or less fully dealt with. After a little bit of action, it became clear that a) she was totally outclassed by Mirai and b) she wasn’t so much hell-bent on revenge as she just needed an outlet for her grief. It was fairly refreshing how they wrapped things up quickly and didn’t force the miscommunications any longer than they had to.

Too, the heavy drama was nicely moderated by a good deal of banter and comedic interaction in the earlier half. Hiromi and Akihito forcing each other to listen to salaryman yaoi audio was a hoot, and Mirai’s quirks, if a bit random, seem to gel together into this whole image of a character who’s got an impulsiveness that prevents them from every escaping her comedic level of superpoverty. If nothing else, it’s a very tried-and-true character type, one that worked very well for Ban and Ginji in Get Backers.

The worst part of the episode, by far, was the somewhat abrupt banking turn the plot took after Sakura was defeated, as everything has apparently been going according to some ill-defined plan of the villains’ at this point. That the organization is making a ploy to kill Mirai is a notable plot point, but the details of their scheme and the way they shoehorned in a very weaksauce title drop at the end were definite evidence of some issues with the script. If this is how the second half is going to go (and it doesn’t have to; for all I know this arc could be resolved in a week’s time), then they might as well have just skipped the serious story entirely and had the cast getting themselves into freestyle ramen eating competitions.

Insofar as this show appears to be attempting to dial up the zany each week, this episode’s chase scene/gadget showcase definitely qualified as an upgrade in that department. For one thing, chase scenes are just intrinsically great ways of continually feeding tension, and the stakes (Masayoshi’s identity against 10 million yen) were plenty high. For another, there’s something intrinsically fun about watching a guy casually dodge bodies while talking on the phone.

The newly minted Flamenco girls also added to the fun with a great black comedy bit where Red and Blue tried to copy Mari’s signature move. I really like how they’re very much off doing their own thing at this point, not being a part of every escapade but being involved enough that they pop up at one or two points per episode. It’s the right balance of the cast; they feel a lot less clunky in cheesier gag roles.

Samurai Flamenco’s new gear, a test of the boundaries of the phrase “street legal” that was technologically equal parts Zeon laboratory and Office Depot, was one of the high points of the episode. It was very cute to see each new piece of gear unveiled, something like watching inspector gadget spin a lottery wheel. The fact that there’s a scientist out there both smart enough to invent devices like this and hot-blooded enough to give them to a good-natured maniac in tights opens up a good deal of viable paths for the plot to take. Much more than tacking an extra zero onto SF’s bounty and watching galax users fail to track him down, at any rate.*

*That dynamic’s going to have to settle down soon. There’s only so many times they can up the price before it starts to feel gimmicky.

One of the fun things of reading a manga or watching an anime that didn’t start out with a rock-solid grasp of its own identity is the sometimes-futile-but-always-amusing attempts to meld a bunch of disparate elements together into something that feels like a complete product. Maybe it’s just that I prefer mixed genre shows to pure cases of one element, but I, at least, gravitate towards shows that have that organic feel. It’s one of the reasons I like mid-tier monthly manga so much; between their loud, energetic character types and their solid+ grasp of visual techniques, they hold a little more intrinsic cohesion than the field. Put another way, you can mix vastly disparate genres provided your characters are amusing and your visual acumen is there.

Hence the candid camera

And this was the week Arpeggio really flashed its chops in that regard. Already having solidly established the show in the naval combat department, the Kishi/Uezu team really embraced the harem comedy components of the show this week, and the result was pretty much up to their track record, an effective combination of character-centric gags that cleared the air after last week’ darker dramatic turn.

Takao’s newfound, somewhat unhealthy fascination with getting one particular human to captain her was something that had been building up for a month, but the hilarity of her almost-confession was accentuated heavily by the addition of a second crazy A.I., this one with a similar level of interest in Iona. The scene where she and Hyuga attempted to peel Iona and Gunzou away from each other was quite lively, largely thanks to the latter’s mile-a-minute personality. So far I have yet to see the series add a cast member who doesn’t add to the potential for witty banter.

There were still dramatic components of the episode, chief among them Haruna formally cutting off ties with the fog in favor of Makie.* That was a scene that did what it had to, drawing a clear set of battle lines for the upcoming confrontation between Gunzou’s now 2-vessel fleet and what looks to be something on the order of 10 battleships. Watching how the crew handles its new bounty of strategic resources in what is at least a 5:1 odds battle figures to be prime-time viewing.

*Side note: actually addressing the thing with Makie’s meds was respectably thorough writing. How a girl who needs a nightly cocktail of drugs to survive was going to last the day bothered me after last week made it clear she was going on the lamb, so props to the script for covering it.

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the show’s promise of more plot, and this episode was more or less what I expected in that regard. The worst part was the scene with Miroku in the car with Mitsuki. Is it really necessary for this show to force its title down my throat with a bunch of terminology? Do they really need to go that far out of the way to explain the concept of a super-S class demon to an experienced audience? Though, granted, a lot of that scene was the shadowy organization’s Miroku spewing bull intentionally to throw the protagonists into confusion. There have been many, many better monologues this year alone; his was just poorly presented, opaque foreshadowing.

Still, at least it was more subtle than the imagery surrounding Akihito’s flashback sequence.

But I do continue love the extent to which Akihito’s glasses thing hasn’t been expanded upon. It’s really common, though avoidable, for shows to get caught up describing the particular fetishes of certain cast members at length and ad nauseum seemingly without realizing that their jokes are much less funny than the writers seem to think. In this case, not only is the comedy showing a bare amount of variety, but it’s not taking up way more space than it should for the level it’s at. Though the joke of the episode has to go to Ayaka for that little bit of businesswoman’s acumen.

Back to the larger point, I think the problem is less that the plot of this portion has been bad and more just that the villains lack anything compelling. They certainly aren’t likeable enough to root for, and they’re far from hateable enough to root against. I’m not saying I need them to murder a bus full of orphans, but I need them to do something more than present threats of a vaguely specified nature against one or two of the protagonists. At the very least, doing that well is a strengths of shows well outside KnK’s genre bracket. Mid-tier battles series work better when the opponents are easy to lay into, not when they’re putting the hero into a temporary coma for unspecified reasons. As it is, I’d rather the show be putting the screentime into the “spirit warriors hunting incredibly vulnerable game” subplot that the calm has brought about, or any given loose world-thread introduced previously. There’s a limit to what sort of plot you can introduce based on what type of characters you have, and Jukki Hanada seemingly wasn’t in his element there.

That said, I did like how they linked up Mirai heading to Akihito’s bedside with Miroku’s fairly obvious, though still unspecified, aggression. That’s the sort of setup for a last-minute save that good battle series thrive on. That, and this breed of likably-hatable facial expression:

This is only the second episode of the year to which my immediate reaction was to go back and watch the whole damn thing over again. While the last four minutes of it will understandably get the most attention, that was by no means the only part of the episode that wowed. There was so much stuff happening this episode, well beyond the typical level of “everyone doing their own thing” that characterized the episodes introducing the Flamenco Girls. Looking back on the episode a second time, it’s actually pretty clear that most elements of this episode were there to bring the first, more realistic portion of the series to a close while still keeping some compelling elements simmering. Because while the choreography of the fight scene in the final minutes was delightfully down to earth,* that doesn’t change the fact that it was against a man who had animorphed into a mechanical gorilla with a guillotine in its chest.

Before this episode pushed all its chips on black with that awesome gorilla scene, it impressed considerably with the reveal about Masayoshi’s parents’s deaths. The actual reveal itself wasn’t the meat of it, but that presentation was exceptional. I really like the choice to make that moment a mental conversation between Samurai Flamenco and his creator, rather than simply showing Masayoshi read the information. It speaks to shock on a much deeper emotional level, something the audience needs to empathize with going forward. The best part of all that? Try the blank page Masayoshi turned to after the reveal was made. Talk about strong imagery; it’s not as obvious a push as “You’re gonna carry that weight.”, but it’s not far behind in terms of sending a strong message. Now that the guidebook is finished, it’s up to the student to finish the story.

Of course, that boost in conviction, coupled with a hard-earned reduction in crime rates, very neatly fed into the next step in SF’s hero career, serving as a police chief for a day.** Since it was going after a cocaine facility, I was expecting he would get mixed up in some violence. But, at least before the mysterious pill very conspicuously dropped to the floor, I was expecting something on the order of a blocked gunshot or a defused bomb. I was not expecting a gorilla with the voice of Rudolf von Stroheim to viscerally decapitate a cop. That didn’t so much smell like raised stakes as it did break a bottle of Essence of Akagi Shigeru all over the show..

The biggest shock factor from this episode may be the gorilla, but it shouldn’t distract from what was in general an excellently-scripted fight sequence. The fight scene itself reminded me very much of early Sakura Wars, where the team struggled to defeat single kouma and ended pretty much every fight with dozens of new claw-shaped scratches on their machines. I liked how the technology was more or less useless and they ended up just barely scraping by with a bag of cocaine and a riot shield.

If this is just some dream sequence, that’s fine because it’s been well-handled and the impact is very definite. But if this is some prolonged prologue shit a-la Visions of Escaflowne, and I’m inclined to think it is, it blows the lid off any ceiling the show may have had. In that case, reroll your character sheets, because Omori just brought the dragons.

*It’s sentai hero Dai-Guard. There can no longer be any doubt whatsoever. Cue the celebratory anthem.

**Finally putting his entertainment on the same level as Shijou Takane.

I was expecting a more straightforward head-on confrontation after the arrangement of battleships opposite one another last week, but this show surprised me again. It was a sense of surprise that went from cautiously neutral to pleasant, as the cast just ended up in a scenario that was equal parts smooth-talking negotiations and beach party. There’s certainly an appeal to the way Gunzou picked, the subversive-diplomacy-verging-on-bribary option. It’s just a shame the ship he was trying to lull ate the peppers first, disarming the live charm-offensive grenade Gunzou and the crew tossed out. The slight expression of realization from Iona when she looked at Kongou’s plate was beyond priceless.

Beyond that, I gotta say that I really liked the beach party portion of the episode. One of the pleasures in anime with even decent casts of character is just watching them bounce off one another in goofy freestyle, and the beach party was just jam packed with that. In addition to bulking up the charming aspects of them all, it also doubles as a bonding experience for everyone on team Gunzou, as they hadn’t really had time to hang out as a group and gel before now. It should make the next episode, which will presumably contain a straight-up blow-by-blow with the now guns-blazing Kongou, worth the wait.

Eschewing my usual order for this week for the obvious reasons, plus the fact that I’m a day late getting to everything that came out since Monday.

Samurai Flamenco is the Allen Iverson of the Fall season; every subplot you can dredge up is interesting as hell. For starters, King Torture is going to be a thing. Which means that Goto and the Flamencos are an, albeit not entirely textbook, hero team. It’s a dynamic made more juicy by the fact that Mari didn’t really react to King Torture’s proclamation until he acknowledged Samurai Flamenco as the main character of the show. Meanwhile, her finisher remains blunt trauma to the groin even with triceratops-cauldron hybrids.*

On the production side, there’s plenty more to sink your teeth into. Takahiro Omori is still a badass who pulled off a longer version of Escaflowne’s prologue, except in 2013 where that stuff is approximately 20 times as commercially painful. This is far from the biggest right turn a show written by Hideyuki Kurata has ever taken, but the “coolest show by him” crown is very much in a rough and tumble title defense at the moment. The show is still hiding OST at this point; the scene where SF showed up on the bus had another brand-new track. And just how little animation can they get away with? This episode utilized still frames like it was the late-80s.

I’m a huge fan of both Dai-Guard and Astro Fighter Sunred, but I didn’t think you could mix their formulae like that and have it work. It’s working right now, though. The fact that they’ve already gone through at least 8 monster of the week battles after an episode and change does make me wonder whether this arc is going to last for 13 episodes or just 3. The pacing suggests to me that this King Torture business will either be over or escalating wildly when it hits the halfway break in late December.

*Oh, a further fun subplot alert: If it wasn’t enough that Stroheim’s VA showed up last week, now ACDC is getting in on the action. I have to wonder if this show is eventually going to tap the entire vocal cast of Battle Tendency.

It’s a testament to the chemistry the show’s been building between the main four that the drama over Akihito’s transformation this time felt as real as it did. I particularly liked the scene where Mirai found his notes on her birthday gift; that was a nice, quiet package of emotion.

Unfortunately, that was one of the few things I liked about this episode, the rest was full of irritating, bush-league cliches.

For starters, the fight between Izumi and Miroku had a textbook bad fight trope that’s always bothered me. It’s a really cheap dodge when someone gets hit by an attack and it’s an illusion all along; if it wasn’t previously established that it was possible, the guy comes off less as a strong character and more as one the writers will allow to pull powers out of their ass. I know this wasn’t the main focus of the episode, but these little things are still important.

Miroku last episode was shallowly manipulative, and Izumi doing the same routine this week was little better. I mean, it’s pretty clear to the audience that Izumi manipulated the current situation as well, so her attempt to pit Mirai against Akihito for real feels like a very shallow plan. It’s more frustrating than compelling to watch, and while I like how the rest of the cast took it, these two have pretty consistently been the low point of the show. This whole plot would have been a lot worse if Hiromi hadn’t spotted her machinations pretty quickly.

And in the first place, isn’t it weird that characters shown to have been pretty freakishly strong and outclass Mirai for much of the series aren’t just setting up a favorable battle for themselves? That wrinkle just makes the transparent manipulations seem even more forced. I’m not at all sure the ending is going to be satisfying at this point.

If I had to list of things I really like about the show at this point, after putting down the whole “you can’t stop the future” attitude behind its production, the next thing immediately on the list would be that awesome battle soundtrack. It’s nice to feel like every part of the show is bringing the big-drama gear to the table, and nothing says unshakeable like the way the music maxed out and the camera zoomed around when Hyuga opened off the combative festivities.

This battle was a lot more conversation-heavy than I expected. While there was a lot of nicely done SFX going on, complete with some mega-cannon versus mega-cannon action, it did lack the feeling of grit and desperation that characterized the earlier battles in the show. I probably would be harsher on it if the effects of the continued probing of Kongou’s philosophy on the part of Gunzou’s team wasn’t part of a deliberate plan to put her off her edge. Still, the net effect of the way the battle was shown definitely cut out some tension; it was essentially a countdown where you knew that Iona and Gunzou were going to survive to see reach zero.

What I liked far more about this episode was the content of the conversations. Compared to last week, the raised stakes in the background lent an edge to the way they handled themselves, and made Takao in particular a bit more fun to root for. The dialogue first came off as a little bit too textbook teaching robots to love, but it branched out into a bit more depth once Iona (who’s been quieter and presumably left more unsaid) got talking. And, as previously mentioned, the punchline that it was all to distract Kongou was a nice sinker.

I-400 and 402 making their move after the end credits happened real fast. I doubt the main couple would actually die in such a manner, but it’s definitely a legitimate question as to how exactly they’re going to survive 50+ atmospheres of pressure. As always, it’s a cliffhanger that kept me interested in the action.

This is honestly a hard episode to comment on. Five minutes in, I was all ready to put on my hype hat and just shower it with praise for sidestepping the colossal, ill-conceived excess drama that pervaded the second half, opting instead for a three-episode aftermath, like a more extreme version of the twelfth episode of Ookamikakushi cross-bred with the final exam from Hunter x Hunter. Unfortunately, that decision wasn’t the one the writer actually made.

Instead, we got an an episode that was, among other things, a poorly placed and overly long downswing in pacing. I get that they were going for added drama by having Mirai turn out to be an assassin all along, but do they really need to show each meeting she had with the Nase family about that job? Every bit of information I needed on that I got through the initial reveal. With much more pressing questions (Mirai’s apparent death being one of them) on the table, the entire second half of the episode felt like a colossal waste of time.

What’s more, I’m close to 90% sure that Mirai’s death is almost certainly going to be overturned by some sort of spirit magic or deus ex machina. If she doesn’t, it means the show traded an opportunity to show a few episodes of characters interacting for a few episodes of characters angsting over naught, effectively swapping a chance to show off its strong points for a chance to have a “proper” climax. If she does die, that means the show killed off a heroine for a very weak underlying reason; three capable expert handlers can keep Akihito’s dark side in check, so it’s very implausible they’d need to resort to underhanded ploys requiring outside help to bring him down if they really wanted to do so.I mean, there’s a veritable standing army of exorcists waiting to profit off the calm. They could have been paid to finish off a major threat at any time if it was really important enough to require immediate attention.

A lot of this frustration on my part does chase back to the fact that the show’s titular demon really doesn’t seem like much of a world-destroying threat, but it also hurts that the shadowy-dealings part of the show are just so token and canned. I’ve seen really good plots about leaders having to do the wetwork to keep the world safe, but when the majority of damage caused by the supposed threat to the world they’re trying to seal is caused by their sealing efforts, it’s very hard to take their motives seriously.

Depending on how my schedule for next week goes, this might end up the last episode of the show I actually watch. It seems dead set in showing off its weak points, and the outlook for the conclusion is not particularly promising.

King Torture’s organization is a really big enigma at this point. It’s got the Sunred comically incompetent villains, but it’s also got a definite second gear that puts it on a creepily effective streak, and that was full-up on display this episode.

According to the man at the top, that was all part of a deliberate ploy. I’d like it less if this were all part of some elaborate plan and not changing gears to fit the situation at hand, but if it is a 100% intentional strategy, then it’s a surprisingly astute one. There’s been plenty of good exploration in other works of what happens when the heroes (or really anyone) win repeatedly and overwhelmingly over a long period of time.*

Whether the initial winning streak was a deliberate one, it was really interesting to see the protagonists react. Mari got a weird combination of angry and bored, tempting fate with an in-your-face challenge to K.T., an acto fo poking the iron maiden that probably made her kidnap target alpha. Masayoshi lost a lot of his initial “I don’t care if it’s just one kid” determination and let his small-time celebrity go to his head. I like him quite a bit less now because of what I saw this week, but I kinda think I’m supposed to. Time will tell whether that move was a good idea or not; it’s harder to stay engaged with a story this sidewindery without a likeable cast of characters. Gotou does kind of take care of that, since he’s still the level-headed smart guy he’s always been. By all accounts, he and the professor were the only ones who saw that the big twist might happen, and I totally emphasize with him flaming Masayoshi’s video streams at this point.

At this point, just the fact that the heroes are in the state they’re in proves K.T. had a point in his monologues. We always knew Mari wasn’t in it purely for the people, but the extent to which Masayoshi soured up, even over an extended period of time, shows that it’s difficult to have motivated heroes without credible villains. And since their battles are looking increasingly like ones that’ll start posting body counts again, the show may start to really deconstruct the hero fantasy in an entirely different way from how I initially expected.

*Including a certain Brandon Sanderson novel that should have been on shelves a month ago. One of the big things I like about A-list manga and anime (as opposed to A-list novels and games) is that they do a great job of keeping their releases to a regular schedule. Granted, from a creative perspective, you do trade away some valuable fine-tuning that way and raise the risk of burnout. But I find that a lot of that is often offset in the quality of the finished product by the increased focus a hard deadline brings. This is one of those issues where each side brings pluses and minuses, and it kinda comes down to what flavor of creation you’d rather have.

I have to admit, I was expecting a lot more of this episode to focus on the rest of the cast’s effort to rescue the now-submerged Iona and Gunzou. I wasn’t expecting, or even really hoping for, a focus on those two. But that’s the direction the show decided to go in, and it produced an outstanding piece of work as a result. There were a few moments where they went a little overboard with the drama (Takao’s sacrifice laid it on pretty thick), but the majority of this episode was quietly stuffed with character detail for Iona and Gunzou.

One thing that really stood out to me in this episode was the lack of noise all throughout the entire time Gunzou and Iona were trapped on the ocean floor. The merits of prolonged silence/lack of music as a scene design choice are many. It’s a really, really powerful tool, and it shows the staff trust their characters-slash-material-technique enough to stand out without what’s normally one of the key aspects of presentation. The better your OST is, the more guts it takes to ditch it.* This was, in hindsight, the perfect choice for the very isolated and quietly urgent atmosphere of that scene.

That sound direction by an uncredited staff member isn’t the only impressive technical part of this episode. There was also return on an investment Kishi Seiji had been making for weeks; Iona’s initially robotic motions and expressions have become much more human. One of the central points of the episode was that Iona had evolved as a character enough to prioritize Gunzou’s life over the fulfillment of the nominal #1 objective. To that end, it helped a lot that she was showing very real, if subtle concern on her face while she was finding out that cold temperatures are bad for humans.

I’m not entirely clear on where the show stand for the ending at this point. It would be anticlimactic if the crew just managed to successfully deliver the warhead, especially with so many loose threads (Kongou, the creepy twins, and the long-term outcome of the conflict) still out there. It feels likely we’ll wind up with another naval battle and successful completion of the mission at hand to close out the show, with a possible sequel hook mixed in.**

*Somewhat related tangent; it’s been a while since I’ve seen Figure 17. That series is notable in quite a few ways; it was one of the first series to adopt the one hour, once per month format later used by Katanagatari. Another way was that it pulled a version of what Arpeggio just did, putting in something on the order of 20 minutes of straight silence to honor a somber time in the lead female’s life. Which had the unintentional side effect of making it perfectly clear just how weak the series’ default soundtrack was.

**Not at all out of the question, given the fact that the amazon special edition of the show’s first volume sold out about 20 days before the release after getting something in the range of 4000 preorders. With another 1000 apiece for the regular BD (preorders have skyrocketed after the limited one cashed out) and the DVDs, the sequel probability equation predicts a 44% chance for a sequel if the show gets no license, produces no notable increase in manga sales***, and goes on sale today without getting 15 extra days of preorders.

***It quite possibly did cause an increase in manga sales; volume 7 didn’t chart in the May when the threshold was 19000 volumes, and volume 8 sold 33000 volumes at the end of October. That might be lowballing gains on that side, as I’ve found in the 2011 and 2012 data that gains in sales from volumes released less than two months after the anime airs are usually dwarfed by subsequent totals.

From the beginning, Kyoukai no Kanata reminded me of a mid-major series; the type of show laced with explosive potential and nuclear flaws for which execution makes the difference between all-time and forgettable. There are many of these types of shows, though comparatively few that I’ve followed this season.* And while they might not always end up being entertaining to watch, they’re always very enlightening to discuss, because they’re the easiest case studies for the difference execution can make for the same core set of ideas. This show fits that paradigm to a T; it has a very definite set of strengths and weaknesses, and does not understand what they are. An episode that stuffed in some questionable presentation choices with very genuine moments from the main cast served to underscore that core issue.

It’s hard to mention good ideas executed poorly without mentioning how the music terrifically clashed with the scenery at the end there. There’s no question that opening/ending themes can be used in a number of powerful ways; I’ve seen it work enough times (via Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Un-Go, to name two recent examples) to know it’s a pretty reliable tactic. What separated this from, say, Kuragehime bringing back the love, is that the opening isn’t very well-fitted to the scene in question. It reminds me of Zetsuen no Tempest earlier this year, which ran an upbeat happy ending song that did not at all sync with a scene that was unmistakably hoping to be tragic. I actually liked this scene because of how dynamic that hug was, so it’s a step up from the worst case, but that came the emotions behind it, a strength that came out in spite of the musical accompaniment.

While the show is going through the motions of an extremely forgettable dramatic plot, many of its enjoyable parts, the ones that popped out in the first episodes and continue to carry it as a whole. The non-antagonistic cast still has great banter routines. The fight choreography is still desperately great. It’s at the point where the finale could very reasonably dock or add a point to my final score depending on how the variables shake out. Depending, of course, on the execution of it all.

*By my count, the “least surprising surprises” mid-major slate this season consists of Outbreak Company, Arpeggio, maybe Kyoukai, and maybe Samurai Flamenco that’s it. All the others were ones you either knew what they were about from the outset (White Album and Golden Time with romance, Kuroko’s Basketball with guys playing supersports, Gingitsune and Non Non Biyori with their atmospheric everyday life, etc.), very heavily teased what they would be about, or were checked out of the game from week one. I call bullshit on anyone who claims to have cracked the rubik’s cube that is SF or the lottery that is OBC after one episode.

This show seems to be getting returns on everything. Way back in episode 4 when Mari was introduced, it seemed like her too-aggressive side was ultimately going to be used for comical purposes, and would ultimately end up being the umpteenth example of the stereotypical angry, overaggressive girl. That characterization choice, while irritating at the time, yielded huge dividends this week, as King Torture took only a few minutes to shred Mari’s heroic resolve to pieces.

It was a scene every bit as creepy as the picture implies

In an episode where Goto was driving a jeep off a cliff into a missile, KT was swapping his hand for a chainsaw, and Masayoshi humbled up a bit after understanding how much he needed people’s support (though that element could have been played for better development if they had really tried), what I really can’t get over is how much I like that scene with Moe and the pliers. Because of how deep-cutting KT’s words and actions were to Mari, and because of the quiet strength supposedly shallow Moe showed while her finger was getting the steam press. One of the nice things about scenes like this is that they can reveal hidden depths to characters you didn’t think had them. More so than any other part of the continuation (including Masayoshi’s unmasking), I want to hear the next conversation those two have.

If it hasn’t been abundantly clear, I love the way this show just faces 12 o’clock down a straight line and does what it wants with supreme gusto. Lining up 22 frickin’ battleships in a row and sweeping them like bowling pins with a combination of Space Battleship Yamato’s wave motion gun and Initial D’s inertial drift was an excellent way to start the episode off. And that testosterone-pumping curbstomp was followed by a hilarious exchange; the two-second fade to a sad ditty when Takao was mentioned only for her to show up and point out she wasn’t dead was a great way to get mileage out of last week’s overly melodramatic sacrifice scene.*

Since the narrative’s not Onepunchman perfect enough to give us a full episode of curbstomps and witty banter, the majority of the episode was dedicated to the confrontation between Iona and her two sister ships. This particular battle got a lot closer towards the scrappy pragmatism the crew displayed while dealing with Haruna and Kirishima way back in episode 4, as they whipped out decoys with live ammo and a submarine-grade fishing net to pull out the victory. Iona’s emotional role in that confrontation was a bit less nuanced than her previous interactions with Gunzou, but it filled in some variety and kept the scene moving.

I didn’t have any doubt that Kongou  was headed for a breakout when we saw her in King Kong chains that were meant to be broken. All they had to do was make her angry and *poof*, Death Star.

I think the comedic and combat elements of the series, while individually satisfying, could have been integrated a bit more fully rather than split across more tightly defined arcs, with a lot more light material in the middle. That said, I have no real issue with the naval combat being used more to bookend the comedic parts of the series if the finale is a well-handled 3-way between super-Iona, a giant enemy fleet, and Death Star Kongou.

*Nostalgia tangent: For the record, the best time that happened was the midway climax of Dai-Guard, when everybody’s making mournful observations on the radio about the supposedly-dead Akagi Shunsuke while he’s in a truck on his way there, causing the guy driving him to double over in suppressed laughter. Good times.