Another one bites the dust.
So, we’re dealing fully with our magical hacker this week. Said to wield the power over falsehood, he pins our heroes down with gun-armed police drones, forcing Mitsuko to activate her power on “Anywhere but here”. Hacker loses track of the gang, gets creepy with the friend, and then gets a call from the manga artist. This leads him to the week’s issue of manga, from which Mitsuko emerges to beat the crap out of him seeing as his power isn’t exactly combat-based.
We then get a flashback to how this happened, as we see that the emergency teleport sent Mitsuko, Goro, and Iyo right to the manga artist’s door. After getting the story from him, they come up with a plan to have Mitsuko use the manga as a conduit to enter the hacker’s lair, but there’s just one problem: it’s not in this week’s edition. Goro uses his powers of reality revision to change that, however, and we get to what we saw.
The fight, as much as there is one, continues to be one-sided against Mr. Hacker, and he’s forced to undo all his horrible lies. Just as he’s promising vengeance, Mitsuko decides to send him away, and delivers a teleport kick to the south pole. Or the aurora. Or maybe somewhere random, does she really care? His gamer chair, which seemed to be his arcane device, is left behind and this evidently fully signals his defeat, so I doubt it actually matters where he ended up.
Meanwhile, our last cut shows us where Honoka, Kouki, and Chika landed: Right in the grasp of wheelchair girl and her brother, who is facing down Kouki in an electric boxing ring while, outside of it, Honoka and Chika (seemingly the show’s punching bags) are winded and semiconscious respectively, by implication already defeated. So, that’s fun. On to the next one!
So, that was this two episode arc. It has the kind of cat and mouse scenarios you’d expect of a death game and a few good setups, but still kind of fails to wow. We never did get an answer as to why the manga artist and Mitsuko’s friend have actual faces; they weren’t revealed as candidates, and the artist’s bafflement at the whole situation seems like a heavy mark against that idea. So… I guess some accessory characters just get faces now. I would have thought Iyo’s stalker might have rated, but here we are.
At this point, I feel like I need to leave further complaints regarding the visual style for the end, when we know what they’ve actually done with it.
As for the story… I’m waiting for the other show to drop. I guess we have to deal with Chika’s former crew, but we’ve got four episodes left in this half (as the word is the cour split will be 13 – 11). I guess given the pace of this thing that could take all four of those episodes, but what then? Just a parade of villain candidates? Something’s got to come along to shake the formula in order to get us actual progress. I feel at this point like it’s a problem that we don’t know just how many candidates are lurking, the way we knew there were seven Masters in Fate or twelve diary holders in Mirai Nikki: it means there’s not a sense that dealing with these assorted evil-doers is actually making progress, rather than being a moster of the week setup.
And don’t get me wrong, I like a good monster of the week, but endless mode and death game aren’t terribly compatible. Jin, Yoko Taro, please don’t disappoint.