What an awesome episode!! Seriously, now that the finale is nearing, this series is more and more coming together. If you thought that the first half of this series was already impressive, you haven’t seen anything yet. This episode was all about the characters and their development, and especially about Makoto.

So basically, this series has taken four children with a trauma or similar mental disorder, but all of them from very different causes and cases. Masayuki has managed to recover. Tarou has been struggling with his feelings, but basically turned out fine. Miyako, however, ends up possessed and Makoto nearly killed off the rest of his entire family indirectly. A big key is the people around them. I think the reason why Masayuki managed to recover was because of the trust he placed in both Makoto and Tarou, and how he ended up saving Michio from his bullies. That’s why he was the only one who didn’t turn into a Ghost Hound. Tarou got better because he could talk to someone who resembled his sister.

Unfortunately, he took this too far, and called Miyako the reincarnation of his sister. This caused the spirits that have been possessing Miyako to grab their chance and posses her for real. Makoto, in the meantime, only had Tarou and Masayuki, and Tarou basically abandoned him when he ran away from his mother. After that, he didn’t have anybody to trust, which is why his mental state turned out so horrible. It’s an interesting message, which basically a mental illness can be cured through careful nurture, but it can very easily escalate into something much worse.

So in this episode, this all comes together. In the end, even though her partner seems to have died, Makoto’s mother doesn’t die. Instead, she loses part of her memory, and returns to her 17-year old version. To make things even better, she now seems to mistake Makoto for his father when he was seventeen!!! Imagine the shock this must be to Makoto, to see the woman he loathed so much talk to him, energetically like nothing ever happened!!

And that’s just the first part of this episode. In the second half, Tarou finds out that Miyako has a very strange smirk on her face after visiting her father, Makoto finds out that Mei used to have a crush on Makoto’s mother’s partner (explaining why she ended up so worried during the last episode), Tarou ends up trailing Miyako, Masayuki finds Makoto and then leaves, Makoto returns to the hospital, only to find Makoto and finally gets put at ease a bit. When he wakes up in his mother’s hospital-room the next day, he finds out that she regained her memory. I ask you, can a Ghost Hound-episode get any more awesome? Well, it’s up to the final three episodes!

Quite an interesting set-up for the finale. Mostly because I have no idea what’s going to happen. This episode was basically another story on its own, yet it did leave various threads open (for example what happened to Kitarou his father, a newly introduced girl named Caroline and her father?). On one hand these threads will most likely be resolved in the next episode, but on the other hand that these threads alone are by far not enough to fill one episode, so the creators still must have some trump cards left.

In any case, this episode was definitely a Hakaba Kitarou-style build-up episode, simply because like the other two, it wasn’t as exciting as the other episodes. It basically tells the tale of a powerful Youkai who has settled into the house of a manga-artist so that he and his henchmen can take the first steps to conquer the world or something similar. He also has a daughter, whom Kitarou has fallen in love with. The entire thing eventually gets solved when Kitarou’s father gets eaten by this Youkai, and Kitarou’s father in his turn wrecks the brains of the guy like he did with many before. It was really too straightforward to be a regular Kitarou-episode.

The great thing about this episode was that I had no idea what it was building up to. One great point about this series is its unpredictability. You will have no idea what’s going to happen next, apart from Kitarou surviving and the “bad guys” losing. Everything in between, you’ll be completely in the dark. Because of this, I’m really glad that Noitamina has continued its tradition of staying away from the very overused high-school girls, and focused on creative series instead. Not to say that all series with high-school girls are bad (there are quite a few very good series that feature high-school girls), but I’d much rather see series experiment and try out new things than to stay with the “tried and true”-formula.