This episode was about the scared girl, the scientist woman and the owner of that other beach restaurant. It both revisited old premises, but brought enough new stuff to the table.
The first part looked like it was going to develop the scared girl a bit, only for it to reset itself at the end. It’s her story that’s currently in the most danger of being milked out, although it was very funny to see her discover Squid Girl playing video games at night.
The second part of the episode was mostly fun because it introduced a bunch of goofball scientists who clearly have been working too long on their jobs at finding alien life. Squid Girl herself also had a lot of neat antics in her quest to gather subordinates: the banter between the different characters was really great in this part, even though it was completely stupid at times.
The third segment: I really liked that scene in which Squid Girl was put in that room with a drum-set: you could just bet your hat that she’d eventually use her hair on it (which was awesome, by the way). I also have to praise the creators for not dragging out the hot shy girl joke. At all, especially when any regular moe show would have overstated/ the jokes around her and her boobs way too much. Apart from that, this was a typical part which just let Squid Girl alone, and instead of relying on banter it just relied on her own random antics. Worked well.
But still, this episode again wasn’t as good as some of the other Squid Girl episodes: it had its funny moments, but it wasn’t as funny as the first five episodes, and neither was it as creative. Now, the interesting thing is going to be whether this show will pick itself up again, or whether it really ran out of steam. Everything is still possible at this point, especially since this episode looked like it was building up quite a few things for future episodes.
As for the animation… that one also took a bit of a nose dive, unfortunately. Again, it’s nowhere near bad, but it’s not as god as it used to be. In the previous episodes Squid Girl was really well animated, with a ton of frames spent on her movement, but unfortunately this episode didn’t have that. Again, the question remains whether or not the creators are saving their budget, or they blew it all on the first five episodes…
Rating: * (Good)
For the budget on animation, we can’t really tell how it will go since the studio is not very well known I guess. As for the material though, from what I saw of the manga, they actually skipped a lot of the manga to rush through the introductions of different characters. So it will pretty much depend on how they will adapt it but I don’t think they will lack material and be forced to use fillers.
I don’t think the show is loosing its freshness here, but you getting a habit out of it.
As a proof, just notice once again how even old reused joke are still funny as they’re being mixed up with new material. It shows there’s still a lot of creativity to sell out.