Before I begin with the review, I’d like to bring the great news that this is my exact 250th post! Yay!!!! In a bit more than half a year, I managed to produce quite a number of material. Now, up to the 500!
This episode was a very interesting one. Remember the last episode of the first season? Well, it seems that the spirit world last episode talked about was actually this world, there seems to be another feather at this place, and we have another arc which only takes up one single episode. It brings up some nice discussions, though I believe that this was mostly meant in order to flesh out the main bad guy a bit.
The thing I loved about this episode is the fact that we didn’t get to see a happy ending. The characters who died and got revived back last time, are at the verge of disappearing again. They hope that a second feather, located in the horn on the nose of a dragon will be able to please the statue from last time, so that it’ll be able to stop the people from disappearing.
The feather is obtained, thanks to a smart plan from Kurogane, though then it appears that the statue won’t be saving those people. The wish Sakura made last time appeared to have been a temporary wish. The power of the feather wasn’t enough to accomplish it. What follows is a sad scene of people who have died vanishing once more, saying goodbye to their loved ones for a final time. Even though this didn’t mean a lot in terms of the plot, I found myself enjoying this. It really reminded me of Mushishi in some way.
But then we have the bad guy. He’s first seen when the statue refuses to grant Sakura’s wish, at which he seems in very deep thoughts when he sees this. We get to see him again at the end of the episode, after which the persons have vanished into thin air, or green sparks, in this case. While holding a wine glass, he says the same thing that Sakura’s father (or Clow Reed) said to her when she was young: you can’t bring people back once they have lost their lives. We switch to Syaoran and Sakura for a bit, and when we return to him, the woman arrives. They both agree that everything went as they expected. The wine-glass, however, has fallen and the bad guy looks very annoyed. This suggests that our bad guy has once lost someone he dearly loved. This someone probably has something to do with his reasons for acting. I wonder who it could be, and if we already had this person introduced.
On a side-note: it’s great to see that the quality of the graphics has turned up again. Last episode was just a bit too horrible.
On a side-note-2: Yuuko looks more like xxxHolic-Yuuko than ever.
On a side-note-3: Why the heck doesn’t xxxHolic have Tsubasa-Chronicle references? Or will these just appear in the later episodes?
I believe the lack of xxxholic references to Tsubasa is due to the fact they are being aired on different networks, and I believe produced by different companies.
As for Fei Wong, the only explanation for his actions is clearly the inability to change the channel from Syaoran TV. He is hunting for the sadly lost remote.