Okay, so while the introduction of weird accents didn’t exactly help my ability to understand this episode, I still loved every bit about this episode. Really, I’m trying to think of one part of this series that doesn’t stand out, but so far this series couldn’t have progressed better. I absolutely LOVE the pair of Kaiba and the guard (I think his name was Vanilla) as they travel through various world. They stand so incredibly far apart from your usual travelling-companionship. The two of them are without a doubt my favourite characters of all new shows this season, apart perhaps from xxxHolic.

I originally thought that Kaiba would switch bodies with every new episode, but this episode proves us wrong. He just has two bodies: one of the stuffed animal and one of the girl. Both bodies are very different from the Kaiba we saw in the first episode, and it felt especially weird when the stuffed animal suddenly started talking. It turns out that normal rules don’t really apply when you’re into the mind of a person.

What’s also interesting: we see Vanilla into Kaiba’s mind this time, and there, we saw the body he was in when we found him in episode 1. The thing is also that this doesn’t seem to be his original body (because yes, this episode also gives us a small shot of Kaiba when he still had his memory). There’s nothing of that fancy outfit we saw. And really, what the hell has happened to Popo? He hasn’t appeared for four episode, and yet he seems like a vital character in all this, after the previous episode showed some hints that he was connected to Neiro.

In any case, this episode is about an old woman, who refuses to share her dead husband’s “treasure” with her two sons. They may be poor, but they’re always causing trouble for others, and don’t ever pay attention to their surroundings. Of course, the “treasure” turns out to be an ordinary memory-box, but still. The interesting thing is how this episode went into this old woman’s mind, as she’s still trying to forget her deceased husband. He fell off a lighthouse, but she never knew why. Inside her memory, she then finds out that he was just trying to pick a flower, in the hope of making his wife smile again. I probably missed the important point of this episode again, though, due to the above-mentioned dialect.

The art this time was also different from usual. It looked much more like Kemonozume than ever. While it’s usually not that good of an idea to have an episode with a different animation-style than usual (just take a look at Gurren Lagann 04), for Kaiba it works surprisingly well. Perhaps it’s because the changes are there, but not quite radical.

The big improvement, aside from the increased graphics-budget, of the second season is the inclusion of foreshadowing. The first season was very good, but the stories all felt a bit disconnected from each other, aside from the occasional appearances of the Rain and Vestal Sprite. The second season however has cleverly been inserting small introductions of the upcoming arcs in the past few seasons. My guess is that this second season will feature three major arcs: the spider-queen, the current one with the psychic girl and the final one will be Himawari’s background, with in-between small stories like in episode four. It really gives the viewer something to look forward to, and brings more unity to the whole series.

This episode mostly introduced the young girl, and her relationship with her mother. The mother is a typical case of a parent who’s become too obsessed with how famous her daughter has become, and starts seeing her just as a tool, and she’s clearly suffering from a lot of stress. The atmosphere about this episode was just perfect.

In this episode, she was asked to remove the spirit of a dead woman from a sakura-tree. I believe that with the help of Watanuki, she managed to move the spirit to one o the sakura-trees around Domeki’s house. The big questions for the next episode are of course: why does Watanuki feel so drawn towards her and why does she feel so drawn towards Watanuki?

Ah, what an adorable episode! Hardly anything new was introduced, and yet it was so much fun to just see the characters. This is exactly what I mean by a well-written series. Everything about this episode was just so enjoyable.

I love it in a series, where the characters are coming together. This series shows how far you can come with realism, because Murasaki and the five-year old sister of Yuno felt so real together. It’s just like how real little kids would spend their time when bored and not used to each other. And poor Yayoi! Everyone was having fun and eating at the end of the episode, and she was standing out there in the cold, getting hungry.

There’s nothing much else about this episoe to say, though. This really is an episode you need to watch for yourself, rather than read about it. I do want to say, though, that if this is really going to be a 13-episode series, then it’s well on its way to become a classic.

At my April summary, I remember noting how this series is a bit too silly for it’s own good at times…

Well, this episode definitely didn’t solve that problem, as it basically degenerated into a dating-sim/love-triangle/idol-episode. Sheryl and Alto have a little date, while Ranka and Mikhail also spend the episode together. Predictably, at the end of the episode Ranka finds out that Alto is starting to fancy Sheryl. Been there, done that. Ah well, at least this episode was enjoyable. I remember how Souko no Strain was one of the very few series who actually made such an episode work, but that series took much more risks than Macross Frontier does right now.

Still, thankfully the episode could have gone much worse. At least this episode gave some background on the Zentradi for those who’ve never seen anything of Macross like me. Before this episode, I really thought that they were some kind of lost race with just a handful members still alive, though it seems that they’re still living in quite large communities. We also know that Ranka’s song somehow strengthens the Varja, which does explain why one of them suddenly popped up, just as she started singing. For that, I have to give the creators of this series credit: I originally thought that they just timed Ranka’s song and the battle together for more excitement, but there is an actual explanation for why that happened.

Ranka’s song this episode felt a bit wrong, though. I wish that the creators would stop to make a huge spectacle about Ranka’s songs. In that mood, an a cappella-song would have suited much better, but instead the creators suddenly introduced instruments from nowhere and made no attempts to hide the fact that that song was recorded in a studio. Series like Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club and Red Garden have shown that songs that sound spontaneous sound much better than the over-rehearsed ones.

With this episode, I guess that we’ve reached the second novel of the original “Allison”-series. It does worry me a bit that the creators are trying to stuff 10 volumes of light-novel material into just twenty-six episodes (For the sake of comparison: Soul Eater with its 11 volumes has 52 episodes to work with, and Saiunkoku spent 78 episodes for 12 of them). Apparently, there are going to be six story-arcs in this series, with the latter ones taking up two volumes. This means that each arc will be about four or five episodes long.

While the chance for a rushed story is quite big, this short format does keep the story fresh. I’m really wondering whether the director will be able to pull it off. I think the biggest reason for this short series-length is the budget, which you can also see in the animation, which has always been not that special for this series. In any case, at least the director has already shown that he’s very good at characterizations, which should be more than enough to keep me interested.

In this arc, it’s not likely that Allison and Will will board some kind of airplane, and the story is actually quite similar to a random arc of Kino no Tabi: Allison and Will end up in a hostile town, in the middle of winter. This town seems to be very afraid of outsiders (especially if they come in a military car). In the meantime, Benedict follows them, because he’s worried that Allison and Will might have run into trouble due to an unexpected blizzard, after which he meets the mysterious girl we see in the ED. Also, throughout the episode, we can see Allison trying to find courage to confess to Will. She’ll probably propose properly around the end of this arc.