You bet we need to clean up after last episode.
So, the show doesn’t let Okarun, Momo, and Aira just get away with streaking down the halls. We find them in their track suits, being lectured, and then see how the matter progresses in terms of figuring out just what will be done to them.
Aira, at first, seems hot to blame Momo, and suggests that Okarun do the same. Momo… does not fight this as much as you might expect. I guess she’s kind of expecting her reputation to be trash anyway so while she’s not going to, say, outright lie against her own interests, neither is she going to get fully worked up at Aira being Aira.
Momo and Okarun get a chance to talk out that whole mistaken circumstance from before, with Okarun admitting to what he wanted and Momo getting back to her classic teasing since it puts her in a good mood to know that he wasn’t having a fun time with Aira and was instead trying to impress Momo herself by improving his strength on the sly.
Aira gets the perfect opportunity to do exactly what she said she would, but as her classmates start to bad-mouth Momo on their own, she finds the nugget of decent person deep within her self-absorbed shell and both absolves Momo of guilt and admits to having started the nasty rumors circulating about her.
Later, Momo and Aira meet up, and Momo deduces how Aira has been handling things. It’s a very quiet scene, but serves to build… sike! We get the character work, but then the mantis shrimp alien/Dover Demon shows back up, clearly in a bad state, challenging them but then just collapsing.
We then move to the Ayase house, where the Dover Demon has been taken care of. We hear his story, that he needs money for a son sick with a disease that requires constant blood transfusions. However, Momo’s grandma notices that it seems that Mantis Shrimp Alien blood is, in fact, pretty much the same as cow milk. After confirming this, they help the Dover Demon abduct a cow in his flying saucer, and he sails off promising to return the favor if there’s ever a chance.
Oh, and through all of this Momo’s grandma insists there’s no such thing as aliens, and that this just looks like a Kappa to her. It’s a kind of funny bit.
In the wake of this, a visitor arrives at Momo’s house. He is, briefly and right at the end, introduced as Jiji, Momo’s childhood friend and, to Okarun’s poorly-concealed horror, first crush.
This was mostly a downtime episode, because DanDaDan knows how to pace itself, but there was more than enough of the goofiness we’d expect. The question I have is what they’re going to do with the rest of the season, seeing how there isn’t all that much for them to really launch into another meaty encounter. Well, we will presumably see starting next week.