Never did I have such hate/love relationships as with these episodes. Like I predicted, this filler arc ended at episode 68. The good thing is that the awesome bad guys get to stay a bit longer. Let’s hope they’ll get some nice airtime. The bad thing was, that the way the creators resolved this, was horribly uncreative. It doesn’t make any sense either. Why would Yoruichi have interfered with them in the previous episode? Well then, we get some boring explanations, Ichigo discovers that he can’t use his bankai anymore (seriously… not the training stuff again? *dies*). Then a sentence appeared that horrified me. "The Hougyouku that he took has another year’s worth of preparation before it can be used." I kindof feared that something like this would happen, but are the creators seriously trying to put another year into this? I so hope they find a very creative way to solve this.
Anyway, we have some talk, a new bad guy gets introduced, who appears to be the woman in the ED. I wonder when we’ll get to meet the big boss… Ah well, then we finally see what the ED has been hinting all along: the arrival of the three stuffed animals. I’m kindof disappointed with this. The three in their human-like form were extremely amusing, but right now it seems that they’ll be spending most of their time in stuffed-animal-mode. Anyway, their reaction to this was certainly amusing. It’s just too bad that Kon managed to ruin this with his whining.
The rest of episode 69 shows us a bit more info on the new bad guys. One of them lets just go of Chad and Inoue. I don’t see why he had to… apart from being convenient for the creators… The new bad guys themselves also seem like a bit of a disappointment. From the outside, they really look like two-dimensional villains. Especially if you compare them with the previous arc.
The episode ends with something that had to be inavoidable for this show. On one side, it can prove for some nice situations, but on the other side, the creators certainly could have spent a bit more time on thinking this over a bit, as it couldn’t have been done in a more cliché’d way.
Bleach shines when friendly characters annoy the hell out of each other. Bleach falls when it tries to be serious. I think that’s the best way to describe how I feel about this show.
