This show is building up to something. This episode however, decided to ignore that for some good old-fashioned character-building. It wasn’t even a calm before the storm, but rather an episodic story that was meant to push the characters a bit further before the climax starts.
So yeah, the student council wants to take away the club room for the jersey club. To avoid that Madoka needs to find an extra member. They find one, but at the end of the episode that member already quit and the clubroom issues stopped being a problem. The new character is also completely insignificant to the story, so the real point of this episode was everything in between.
Aside from fleshing out, what I think was the most important here was the meaning of the Jersey club to Madoka and Youko (who by the way has a way too small part in this second season): how the club was formed, and how they look at it today. It’s a neat piece of character development for both of them.
As for the main storyline, the only thing that was revealed was that that one guy who has been suspicious for the entire series has something to do with it and has been alive for 20000 years now. I’m still not seeing how it’s going to relate back to the themes of the rest of this series though, but this episode was not bothered by that. And in the meantime, the new girl was annoying but had her charms when she revealed her intentions, and it was fun to see Madoka fly off.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)
20,000 years? Isn’t that pretty much the same amount of time that Fudo Zen guy from Aquarion Evol has been around? 😉
If this Moid fellow is so suspicious, why has Chairman Asteria never been bothered having him around? Also, why does is he given personal access to the stone slab? It would have been nice to see more of Youko’s research of the slab before Moid…did what he did.
If they had to give us a character-building episode, this was a good time. The fourth jersey club member was certainly a throwaway, but it was a nice way to reaffirm both Madoka and her predecessor’s devotion to the ideals of the Jersey Club, real club or not.
Four episodes should be plenty for the final showdown, whatever it ends up being.