Denji cops a feel and we get the proper introduction of the big plot.
We start out this episode right where the last left off: Denji getting his boob-groping reward from Power. It turns out to be… not everything Denji hoped. In fact, it’s practically nothing, leaving him in a daze until he ends up alone doing paperwork with Makima, who extracts the story from him.
Makima chooses to then take an… aggressive educational stance, getting very suggestive and entirely reviving Denji’s interests. Turns out who your partner is matters, Denji. She also motivates him to do her bidding in a longer-term sense: she wants the Gun Devil dead, and is willing to offer any wish as prize.
Makima is a strange person, and it’s hard to know what her actual interest is (besides the fact that I believe she wants the Gun Devil dead), but she is excellent at controlling people, that much is clear.
The Gun Devil, meanwhile, is an absurdly powerful Devil that appeared over a decade before the story’s present, killing over a million people worldwide (including Aki’s family) and then dropping off the radar. It has shed parts of itself, though, and if these tiny bullet-like chunks of Gun Devil flesh are consumed by other devils, it powers them up significantly. The pieces of gun flesh are also magnetized to each other and presumably the main body. The more flesh, the more powerful. So, in order to find and kill the Gun Devil, it’s a matter of taking out other devils who have eaten bits of it and extracting those bits, until enough is had to form a compass to point the way to the real Gun Devil.
This leads to the whole team (Denji, Power, Aki, the eyepatch lady we saw briefly who is apparently Aki’s senior as a devil hunter, and a pair of rookies) going to kill a devil giving off a gun flesh reaction in a hotel. Teasing Denji with the promise of kissing aside, they end up trapped in a space loop where going up or down from the eighth floor leads right back to the eighth floor. Obviously devil powers, but what devil and what they can do about it remain unrevealed for the time being.
So, this episode reached the point I was expecting from the start: we now have at least our first big, overarching enemy for the show in the form of the Gun Devil. It’s the one that everyone wants to kill, it’s responsible for Aki’s woes, and it’s behind other devils being more powerful. Whether it will be a compelling antagonist, or if instead there will be more yet behind it, that’s yet to be seen, but it’s clear that this is going to be more than just a monster of the week.