Okay, I was wrong. Roux didn’t come to Toras in order to protect Firiel, he came to Toras because he wanted to get out of the castle, which backfired a bit, so he ended up dressed as a woman in the Secret Garden. The episode answered a number of small questions which came up in the previous episodes. They’re more like details, though they’re good to know.

Whenever the story turns to Roux, the overall mood remains horribly dark. There were no Princess Princess references at all. On a side-note, there were plenty of Utena-references, though. These really made me rejoice. The scenes weren’t as obvious, but the fencing, the stances and the elegance really reminded me of the style that Utena posessed.

Anyway, when the story turns to Firiel, however, the mood of the show suddenly turns light. She suddenly has friends, when compared to the previous episode, and people actually start to notice her. This episode was sortof like a room with a broken light: light-dark-light-dark-light-dark, et cetera.

Anyway, the episode starts with Firiel questioning Roux. Roux gives his explanation, and reminds Firiel that she’s easy to fall for traps. When he walks alone a couple of hours later, he gets cornered by the student council. Apparently, they run some kind of policy to check the underwear of each of the new transfer students coming in. (Hmm, why wasn’t Marie a victim?) Roux, however, reacts totally different than Firiel did, and he manages to get away.

Later, when Firiel, Marie and Roux have lunch (or breakfast, though it seems too late for breakfast), Roux tells what happened, and Firiel is glad that the student council didn’t discover Roux’ identity. Then, they notice that everyone suddenly stares at them. Not with anguish, but with awe. This is either because Roux looks cute in some strange way, or they found out that Firiel made friends with Adale. I’d put my money on the last one.

That night, Roux decides to pay Firiel a visit, and invites her for a play of chess. It really was a good idea of Eusis to introcude Roux to this game, as he’s quite fond of it already. During this game, however, Firiel discovers that not everything of the Ephemeris (Firiel’s father’s research) was burned in the first episode. This was probably the first time that Firiel managed to surprise Roux with her knowledge. Roux then teaches her a few things about the link between chess and the real world.

Another interesting fact is that the main sister of the school, Sister Lain, is often compared to the Astraea statue in Toras. This is why everyone calls her the affectionate spirit. (Roux again uses this moment to point at her slow thinking. Even though she’s one of the smarter main characters out there. But then again, Roux’ awareness is a very extreme example).

We then turn to the end of one of the classes. Roux is sleeping (after all, why would he want to follow courses in order to please men, except for giving Adale a huge source of inspiration?) and Vincent asks Firiel to come with her. She wants Firiel to challenge Ravenna (the leader of the apparently “Fake” student council. Makes you wonder what happened to the “Real” student council) to a sword duel. In sword duels, not the strongest ones win, but the most elegant ones win. I like this. It really reminded me of Utena.

Anyway, we turn to that night, Roux takes a bath, and suddenly he recieves a love-letter. He shows this to Firiel, and she really gets angry at the line at which the girl professed her love for him, though the viewer’s attention was more directed to the sentence above: “In my mind, your back looks just as graceful as stars.” This can’t be a coincidence, after what happened in episode two, and yes, our suspicions get confirmed the day after.

Firiel is determined to find out who the girl was, though she gets dragged off by the Uo and Hana-clones, bringing her to Vincent for her first training. Roux, meanwhile, gets visited by this girl who wrote the love-letter. It appears to be Sister Lain. She mentions Hermes Trismegistus, otherwise known as the leader of the bad guys. She then forces Roux to obey, otherwise she’ll hurt Firiel. I’m very interested to see what he’ll do in response to this. After all, he’s got brains for a reason.

Firiel, meanwhile, gets introduced to another character: Igraine. She’s a master-swordsman, and she’ll be the one to train Firiel’s swordsmanskills. Firiel’s a fast learner, and judging from the battle-choreography from the mock-fights shown in this episode, the swordfights in the next episode might become extremely worthwile. Ravenna then decides to pay the two a visit, after which becomes revealed that the late Roselite was very good friends with Igraine, though she eventually chose for Ravenna. Igraine hates Ravenna because of this, explaining her motivation to train Firiel. Another Utena reference: the more Firiel fights, the more people become to admire her, and watch her duel. Meanwhile, we see Lain staring from a window, with a big smirk on her face. This should promise something for the next episodes.

That night, Firiel discovers a chess-piece from Roux’ chess-game, which she knocked off a night earlier. When she comes to bring it back to him, she finds him in a nightmare, and she discovers all of his scars. What follows is a very nice emotional scene (very early as well, considering that this is only the fourth episode). It becomes even more clear that even though the two of them argue a lot, they will be protecting each other.

Haha, that’s more like it! Finally we have a really enjoyable episode again. This episode really shows that our modified souls work better as antagonists. Why? Because:
- They’re weak, so they have to use other measures to win than just pure fighting.
- They’ve got some awesome powers, with which you really can perform beautiful strategies.
- They aren’t shadowed by all of the other 40 protagonists that Bleach features, so you can actually see them in action a bit.
- They’ve got internal conflicts.
- They have extremely good personalities for antagonists.

What happens in this episode: basically, the Bounto’s have disappeared into oblivion after the previous episode, leaving no trail at all. The three modified souls are assigned to Ichigo’s house, as his family members posess a lot of spirit power. Kon, of course, doesn’t like this at all, and he starts a flame war with Ririn. When Ichigo has to remove them by force, his little sister enters his room. The scene afterwards was very amusing indeed.

Then, the alarm goes off. Yes, the alarm. Remember? It’s from a loooooong while ago, when Ichigo just met Rukia. I can’t believe the creators actually remembered this. I have no idea why, but I always really liked it when a hollow appeared back in those days. I just loved this scene, as it’s a bit realistic again. We just have two persons protecting a neighbourhood from hollows, just a routine-job. Nothing special at all. (This also was the shortest fight in Bleach ever. They’re learning! ;))

The modified souls then get a crazy idea: set up traps for the bounto’s. These, of course, don’t make any sense at all, so they’re quickly laughed at. They then decide to go extreme, by disguising themselves as a couple of dolls (Bounto-dolls, that is). They expect our group to chase them, miss them, and then catch them with help of the traps they set up. What happens in reality is that they get immediately attacked by a serious Rukia, without any chance to escape.

The modified souls then realize that they can’t get our of their suit, and they can’t communicate with anyone except themselves. Whey they are cornered by both Rukia, as Ichigo, as Renji, they decide to go even more extreme, by using their powers against our protagonists. What follows is an extremely enjoyable fight. Especially the illusion-powers of Ririn work very well, changing Renji’s Zabimaru into its equivalent: a broom.

I keep hoping that the creators realize that these kind of episodes are the things that make Bleach shine. Though I think they’ll never find out, and the next episode will be filled with guys showing off their spirit power to each other again. Sigh. Still, this episode was worth the viewing.

I might’ve picked up a lot of the most nessecary things in order to be able to follow the story, there’s one thing I seemed to have missed: Seiran is indeed Ryuuki’s brother. This explains their relationship, and the fact that he was even able to be positioned this high in the military. Watching the second episode made me also see an unimportant, yet very amusing detail: Koyu has absolutely no sense of direction. This makes him even greater as a character.

Anyway, about the episode: the creators decided to let one scene involving two characters talking take up an entire half of an episode. This was just two characters talking, no more, which means a whole lot of trouble for me, trying to understand it. A lot of important facts were revealed, though I all missed them, unfortunately. This is what I managed to catch:

We start the episode with the initial goal of this anime being fulfilled: Ryuuki is finally taking up politics again, and the country has hope once more. We see the advisor smile, which is of course, logical, as his plan seemed to work. The other main characters discuss this, and they seem pretty happy about it. But then we see a character which has been neglected for a bit: Kourin. She looks at Shiurei, and you can almost put a sign on her saying: “Hello, I was ordered to do something bad to you, but I really don’t want to do it, what should I do?”. Or something in that direction. I like the fact that each character has some kind of deep role in this.

We turn to the evening, and Kourin’s caretaker (how the heck is that woman called again?) brings Shiurei some tea. She says that Kourin’s too sick at the moment in order to deliver her self-made tea, so she delivers it for her. The tea is actually poisoned, making our suspicions of Kourin indeed true. Still, it’s no deadly poison, Shiurei only faints, waiting to be kidnapped.

The events get discovered by Koyu, who happens to overhear Kourin getting cornered by someone, while he was getting lost himself. Kourin then gets to take a couple of punches, and the assaulter runs before Koyu manages to get to them. His yelling warns the other soldiers, and it is soon discovered that Shiurei is missing.

Ryuuki and Seiran both set off on their own, without any company. Seiran seems to know where the mastermind behind the kidnapping resides, while Ryuuki goes to rescue Shiurei. I have no idea how they know about the locations, and why they even dared to think to show up alone. Especially Ryuuki.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Seiran rushes to the culprit. The location seems to be inside Shiurei’s house. Why? I have no idea. It finally appears to be one of the old men who hang around at the castle. This is the one who hasn’t been active at all in the series. Then the horrible-half-episode-long dialogue begins. The old man then fully explains why he did it, how he did it, and why he thinks this is the best option. Still, I haven’t been able to pick up any of this.

Anyway, the old guy holds this behemoth of a conversation in order to let the air in the room be filled with some kind of strange smoke. Seiran’s getting a bit affected by it, though the old guy cleverly stands next to the window. Right when Seiran’s about to kill him, he shuts the window and puts on a gas mask. The fog in the room thickens heavily, giving Seiran a hard time to breathe.

He then calls a couple of cark-clothed henchmen, and orders them to attack Seiran. Seiran, however, still has some strength inside him left, and uses this by killing off the first bunch of henchmen. I have to say that I was very impressed with the battle-choreography. It looked really nice and smooth, even though it wasn’t much. The henchmen, however, are with too many, and they finally manage to overpower Seiran, but not before he throws a small knife inside the old guy’s shoulder. Then, Shiurei’s father appears. Apparently, he’s an excellent swordsman, as he kills off the henchmen in about two seconds. He lets go of the old guy, though.

Kourin, apparently, was taken in by this old guy. She was devastated when he found her, and he showed a lot of hospitality by allowing her to work under the castle. She has been, however, favouring Shiurei more and more, so she certainly got her doubts when she suddenly was ordered to poison her. A nice explanation of what happened. She also was too adorible when she apologized. There’s also some story about her caretaker, though I didn’t manage to pick that up.

Ryuuki, meanwhile, found the place Shiurei was taken. He gets attacked by another couple of henchmen (who are actually fairly surprised he was stupid enough to come on his own), though he manages to finish these guys off. Another bunch of henchmen then comes, and uses a fake Shiurei in order to trick Ryuuki to drop his sword. They succeed. Shiurei, meanwhile, has been viewing all this from a distance, and keeps hoping for Ryuuki to notice the trap. Cliffhanger.