I have zero idea what this show is doing or where it's going anymore.

Impressions:

Wait, Seria was captured by Nero? Didn't they all teleport randomly away? I, uh, guess not? Or maybe they did, because everyone else landed in entirely different shows. Whose-Her-Face, the childhood friend, is the only one who ended up in the same one, so she got to sit through five minutes of having tea and exposition with her dad. Which at least ended with him throwing her on the ground, screaming at her, elbowing a dude in the face, and continuing to scream at her until she vomited up goo and a robot dragonfly all over the room. If how every one of these diner conversations ended similarly, maybe they wouldn't be so intolerable. 

That brings us back to Seria, who Nero wants because… uh… he likes her singing? He seems entirely uninterested in Cleopatra and pals aside from forcing her to wear a power suppression evening dress. They also go into exposition mode after fangirling out over… Chiba Sana? Really? This is your historical idol? Chiba Sana? Anyway, Nero wants to combine the ghost world with the human world, conquer both, transform them into a world of art, and has been opening magical holes between the worlds. How none of this has come up before now is a mystery to me. Exposition over, it's time to check in with the sword girl who's in medieval Japan ghost world being screamed at by… legitimately I have no idea who "Manpei" is meant to be, and Google is not helping.

…Yeah, I've completely lost the thread here. 

Next Episode:

…

Ah yes, the elemental weakness triangle: poison > plant > lightning > poison.

Impressions:

Very generic episode, and with this being some dumb test where 90% of the characters fail immediately upon getting any screen time, is not beating the filler accusations. There's all manner of spellfighting with evil wizards in the OP. Why can't we be doing that instead of learning fun facts about gryphons and how the only weakness of poison magic is lightning. Uh, if you say so, guys. Feel like that would just spread it more, and the toxic fumes would be killing everybody in the area anyway with how much you're flinging around, but you're the wizards here.

The character stuff is also very formulaic. The poison wizard is poisonous and has some generic trauma about it. But Spica says "I don't care" and "Let's do our best and be friends" and stuff's resolved. Abbreviated as ever in anime, skipping over actually struggling to give up immediately and leap straight to… not giving up. Except not really because we need to stretch this out to a third episode for some reason. There was barely enough here for a single episode if they didn't keep cutting away to the rest of the characters to do their one joke each. Plus the awful CGI gryphons. Good lord, the CGI in this show looks like 80s stop motion sometimes.

Next Episode:

…

Template template template template.

Impressions:

Ah, yes. The obligatory pre-beach mall episode before the beach episode before the hot springs inn episode. Well, there's one segment before that where they bring back the childhood friend girl only to give her a new gimmick of being a masochist who ovulates at the most minor of abuse. It's just going through the checklist at that point. Every character needs to do a pose with some fetishy swimsuit and say their one joke while the dude yells and everybody blushes.

I may be feeling particularly harsh too because the train ride schtick it ended on was especially bad. They all needed to pee, but going to the bathroom near a boy is too shameful. We're really doing this? Really? The act of excusing yourself to go to the bathroom is what we're making an entire mountain of 'comedic' drama over? Even the unhinged sex crazed maid? You really couldn't come up with anything better? Even just the toilet being out of order or Kyoji taking a monster dump and being extra proud of it as a reason to stay away from the bathroom would've been an improvement. It's all an excuse to have them squirm and show closeups of thighs anyway, but god, it's so weak and pathetic. 

Anime, you gotta get away from diners.

Impressions:

Same issues as the previous couple episodes, maybe even moreso since I'm really sick of any anime that spends 75-90% of the episode sitting in a diner having a little chatsie. And that's literally what this one was and did. Sixteen straight minutes of Nechika and Ame sitting at a diner table, followed by a couple minutes of hanging out in the parking lot. Then they realized that things had probably been a little dull, and so had the world's shortest Scooby Doo chase sequence, with nonsensical CGI running even. Then it was time to go back home and… have a conversation in front of the dump. 

We don't even learn anything new about Nechika either. She doesn't have a particularly traumatic backstory, aside from growing up poor. She kind of has a messiah complex, I guess. But it's like looking at animals in a zoo. It doesn't matter how many 'fun' facts you can spout about how fast cheetahs run or how much existential guilt naked mole rats have for being abominations of nature, they're all just going to be sitting there. An actor that performs no interactions is a prop, not a character. And long conversations announcing your personality traits to no purpose is boring.

Next Episode:

…

Can't y'all get an island and check to see if your utopia even works first?

Impressions:

No sooner does it kill off every named character thus far does it spew out another half dozen meat for the grinder. And boy, when the mask drops, it drops. Neumann immediately broadcasts to the world that she's planning on genociding everybody to create a world of only 'good' historical superheroes, but actually, it's the 'secret' plan of Nightingale, who's still pretending to not be the mastermind except everybody already knows it, so what's the point of that actually? And if we knew they were all being controlled, or worse, like Newton, Einstein, Touya, Masamune, etc, weren't controlled and were misguided, then why did the good/bad guys proceed to murder, melt, and otherwise liquidate all these potential allies? 

Touya also continues to be a baffling weak part of the show too. Oh, sure, I could take your power, and probably fix things, save humanity, etc, but that wouldn't show that I believe in myself. That has to be the stupidest cop out imaginable. There are a zillion other excuses that could be made. It would kill him. His power only works on 'evil' stealing. The true baddies know how to counter it somehow. "I've had character development" when you've barely been on screen for the last five episodes is utter nonsense. Hell, the last five minutes of this episode was the backstory of the random angel girl, which amounted to fridging herself. That's more focus than he's gotten since episode 2. If anything, only shows that no, you have not actually grown at all because you're still being a selfish little idiot with a god complex. But hey, sure. You believe in yourself now. With your power to… make things spikey and be somewhat unkillable unless the other person tries extra hard to kill you? You sure seem ready and able to take on orbital beam weapons and giant mechs.

I've completely lost all threads of the story here.

Impressions:

Once again, I must express my bafflement at what's going on with the production of this show. They went all out on the budget for this episode, including the obligatory song sequence, which was channeling Symphogear's energy where they were mostly fighting while singing instead of just standing apart and singing at each other. At the same time, it was just kind of… a random mini-boss, there to check off a box, so why all the budget and effort put into it? Kind of the same with the nightmare sequence to follow of the AI doing the whole ideal world thing. That was a lot of effort in the visuals just to be snapped out of it by Seria saying "Hey, wait a minute. What if we didn't?"

Then there's the last few minutes of the episode. They reveal that MiucS is Miu… created by the priest dude to suppress 'evil' music, whatever the hell that is, and this is supposed to be a surprise? Both the name and the origin story? But she immediately declares defeat upon being confronted, leaves, and they're ambushed by one of the off-screen other groups, including the evil Nero who's after Cleopatra, and have to random teleport away, which is a power that they have apparently. Except the blonde one gets teleported nowhere, and reveals that she's a double agent who is being betrayed, but also recruited to be the new big bad brainjacked by the AI. 

Have you considered walls? Or pits?

Impressions:

I suppose good for them for recognizing that these segments were kind of pointless and cutting them down to about a third of an episode each instead of padding them out to consume the entire rest of the season, but it still results in a pretty pointless filler-ish episode. Aren't there cultist assassins running around that we could be dealing with instead of taking pre-tests before the actual test, which themselves are a repeat of the previous test from a couple episodes ago? The first segment at least you could say was sort of focused on the one rival character, but she just did the same thing as the second episode, was better than Spica and was semi-upset of her not being a hapless bullying target anymore. A little development at minimum would've helped there.

The middle segment felt like a dumping ground to quickly get through three or four more characters who would not be getting any actual focus any time soon. Just 15 seconds each to say their name, state their power, do one gag, and move on. And then we get to the setup for the previously mentioned test, different from the previous two tests because it's… the "middle trial." …Okay. Whatever you say. I guess it mainly involves the scorpio/poison girl, but who knows. From the next episode preview, it looks to be mainly really awful CGI monsters. Great.

Next Episode:

…

Don't we have an entire set of sisters and parents to also get through?

Impressions:

Gonna repeat myself yet again here. The characters work a lot better in the quieter moments more than the overreactionary ones. Where Kyougi is ride or die and supportive of whatever neurotic nonsense Kanan is up to rather than panting, groaning, and yelling like a horny imbecile. We wouldn't be missing anything to remove one character yelling and overreacting. And it once again ends on one of these, teasing what could've been for an episode that was otherwise a repeat of the previous date one, so already starting in a hole.

The B plot with Jeanne and Ami was also fairly lacking and largely a repeat of both their one note gags. Shouldn't they be trying to corrupt/purify the other? Or be bumbling around modern technology more? Or hooking up? At one point, Jeanne points to a computer and says "Look, it's the internet!" And… that's the entire joke? Did we forget a punchline? Or honestly, them even actually interacting instead of simply both being in the same zipcode at the same time? I don't expect a lot, but why put these characters together at all if they're hardly going to interact?

Please no dental tools.

Impressions:

It's… certainly another episode of this show. Entirely focused on Michica, and she's almost entirely in her own head. She wants to be special, especially to be perceived as special, beautiful, and unique. And I guess had a mental breakdown when she got a pimple, because that made her the same as everybody else. It almost even felt like that was also a performance piece since the yelling was so over the top. 

But there's not really anything else to it because she's so isolated from the rest, but since there's few interactions with anybody, and no culmination to the episode really, it's all just… dumped out. I'd have thought they'd done more with her relationship with Nechika since that also seems to be a pretty integral part of her need to be revered, but she was barely in the episode. The ghost of KAngel was the main one she 'talked' to and validated her. And… uh… that's kind of it. She's just… there. 

Leonardo will always be a mutant turtle to me.

Impressions:

Oh boy, an entire flashback info dump episode. You know how I love those. And again, just like last week, Touya all of a sudden immediately being ready, willing, and able to throw down with the big bad is… a bit weird. Not even a sneak attack attempt or anything. Just straight in with the attempted punchings and stabbings, at complete odds with all his internal sneaking bits and thoughts about subterfuge. Pick a lane at least. 

It wasn't a very interesting flashback either. His brother was actually Da Vinci, founded the team for world peace, and then immediately jumped straight to genocide literally the first time anything bad happened to anybody he knew. Same as every boring ass basic bitch JRPG antagonist from the last 30 years. And all the other people in team good guy were happy to go along with it, even the supposed non-puppet master ones. Looking at you especially, Einstein, whose quest for revenge on the guy who killed the dude who was out to murder all the people they previously agreed to shelter rings just a bit more hollow. Look, man. We just wanted a eugenics purge. I don't know why you're taking it so personally.