Wait, they all have faces?
This episode starts by introducing our next arc antagonist, a candidate with the power of information control (manifest as magical hacking), trying to blackmail a manga artist into changing his story, seemingly just for kicks, and fabricating crimes for him when he doesn’t bow.
We catch up with Goro, who is out of the hospital and getting a party courtesy of Kouki and Iyo. Iyo mentions game streaming and, since they’re at the hideout, Goro invites her to play, before remembering that Akitsu had left some kind of porno on and this caused him trouble before. Iyo turns it on anyway and shockingly it seems to come to life, with the adult actress emerging from the screen to… ask for the help of the assembled candidates in rescuing a friend of hers who was kidnapped by the obsessed stalker hacker.
Hacker, however, calls in forcibly, discerns everyones identities, reveals he has the friend imprisoned with a bomb set to go off in three hours, and then makes them wanted terrorists to the authorities just to screw with them.
In the mean time, it’s been revealed that Chika actually survived getting impaled with a trident, courtesy of Honoka using her flesh powers that I guess can just sort of cure mortal wounds, at least if she’s quick about it. They talk, or rather Honoka squeezes Chika for information. The brother-sister pair are Ryo and Kyo, and she also worked with (and was terrified of) the hacker before.
The gang uses the porn actress’s power of fast travel to escape a surround by cops, but are still on the run and wondering what to do. Honoka catches up to them, and we end the episode.
Again, this episode wasn’t totally devoid of good notes. The little party for Goro was nice, and even got some humor out of Lal encountering human food. But like a lot of these episodes, while it technically did its thing, it felt a bit light. This isn’t the only show I’ve noticed this with – Tower of God was another – but some shows seem to approach their material in such a way that the episodes feel shorter than they actually are. It would probably actually be a nice experience for binge watching, like you don’t get fatigued by it, but the palpable sense of “That’s it?” makes for odd viewing now and again.
At any rate, kudos to the show that this obvious arc villain has a different vibe and direction of threat than others. We’ll see how we handle him I guess, and how well Goro’s condition is maintained as a source of drama, but for now we’re just in setup.
Except for that weird part where all the characters this episode have faces. Porn star and hacker, I get, they’re candidates. But the manga artist who got framed? The friend in bomb peril? They have full character models as well rather than just being NPCs. Are they Candidates as well? Has the visual coding of the NPCs been abandoned? Was it just a lame budget thing trying to look stylish from the outset and I gave it way too much benefit of the doubt? I don’t know at this point – it’s strange. I guess it’s technically better if everyone has faces rather than getting the npc blobs, but it’s supremely strange to change tracks halfway through… if they’ve changed tracks.