The calm both before and after the storm is our theme this week.
Most of the episode is dedicated to the cleanup of Kyoto, and looking at how our characters have changed. We get a much better Akira romance moment, Ichibanboshi running a soup kitchen and talking about his past with Sakuya (who also opens up) and Bou and Gyatarou helping the reconstruction. Suzuran, though, ends up stumbling upon proper clues and bringing them to the attention of the recovering Todo.
Meanwhile, on the Masked Demons side, Rashomaru seems to be grappling with his sin and suffering, but still standing firm on team evil by pure force of sunk costs. He’s sent to kill the scholar from the earlier episode, who manages to needle him into revealing the Masked Demon plans before being killed.
This lets the audience in on the fact that the Masked Demons ultimately want to destroy foreign influence, and are hoping that a massive lot of souls will be able to send the rest of the world packing. The scholar tells them they’re idiots and gets offed, but manages to leave a dying message to the Shinsengumi that suggests that the Masked Demons are going to attack the foreign ships at port in Osaka. This gives us our next plot hook: attempting yet again to stop the Masked Demons from blowing something up.
We’re kind of zero-for-three on that, but we’re also running out of episodes, which gives us a little hope for the upcoming plots. For the time being, Shine On! continues to be itself, a show that isn’t particularly special but that I can’t really say is bad either.