Short Synopsis: Shouko goes on a big adventure.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Another quiet episode with the goal of building up, but it’s an episode well spent, as it develops the character of Shouko a bit more. It was a bit silly of her to mistake Nataru and Shion to have a relationship, but the episode did its job really well, and especially the many other things that happened during this episode made it more than worth watching. And after all, she was about to be taken away from Nataru, so she needed something to vent off her frustrations with. Bullying Shion was the obvious thing to do. ^^;
But damn, I hate it when the creators pull that ‘character X is about to be killed off’-cliffhanger, especially since this show has already seen so many deaths. Now I really want to see that next episode, even though it’s going to take another week for it to air. My guess would be that the creators are going to let Nataru struggle for a bit more, make him escape with that power of his while heavily wounded.
Then, I wonder what Muroto’s purpose in this series is going to be. It’s been pretty small throughout the series, but now that he caught himself a ‘scandal’ of Shion, then I really wonder what kind of repercussions it’s going to have. Shouko is probably going to find out, meaning that her role isn’t over yet, and this episode was probably spent in order to develop her character not just to have a complete cast and for the heck of filling an episode, but it’s actually going to be used somewhere later in the series. Nice.
As a quiet episode, this was actually kinda overdue considering most series when they approach the Action/SoL divide, and it delivered. After the drama of the last three episodes, it’s nice to see things back to normal life.
The thing I can note most about this episode was that it delivered better on every aspect of the episode-type than similar cases in the first season. The Pool episode in S1 was pretty poor, but this one had a better story, better production, better everything.
So yeah, I guess the climax slowly starts to approach next episode, with the plot returning to the criminals again. The question is where the story will go, and will Gomez appear?
And what’s the deal with the taxi drivers? They seem to be randomly placed comic relief characters cursed with car-related misfortune, I just wonder if they will ever have more meaning. Not that I mind either way, they’re nice additions to a fairly semi-serious environment.
great cliffhanger – but this whole episode is considered as a filler, which is not really desirable for a 13-episode series.