Now that we’ve entered the second half of this series, the main storyline pops up again. It’s pretty early this time, in comparison to most other series in the same situation. Five episodes will be plenty of time to get a good climax out of this series, and I wonder what kind of tricks the creators still have up on their sleeve.

The episode starts as Tamaki takes Murasaki to the college she attends. As it turns out, she herself claims to be an expert in terms of love, and yet she gets dumped by her boyfriend because she’s been too rough on him. That female friend of Tamaki really reminded me of the early Rachel in Red Garden. I must say that the director here has been really good realistically portraying the dating scene, as opposed to 90% of the other anime, who strangely enough never heard of the word “party”. Are these that rare in Japan? I can imagine how series with a serious story don’t have time for these, but I’m really surprised that of all these slice-of-life series, nobody seems to celebrate their birthday with a big party…

The second half finally shows some depth to the bad guy, which is about time. The guy turns out to have been in love with Murasaki’s mother. Murasaki was also raised, not knowing who her real mother is, and only just before she died (or just after it) she found out the truth. What the cretors now need to do is continue this development. It’s definitely a step in the right direction, but he needs more attention if he wants to end up as a successful antagonist. I may be comparing him a bit too much with Hervé, though. (From Red Garden, who in my opinion was a great example of an antagonist that works).

Finally! A catgirl who doesn’t end her sentences with “-nya”. She also doesn’t have any of the nervous tics to make her seem excessively cute either. I like that.

In any case: I really must praise the second season by fixing about the only thing that was wrong with the first season: the fact that the stories had no connection to them. The second season so far has been really good at foreshadowing its future stories. It’s a small touch, but it makes this season feel more as a unity than just a collection of random short stories, while avoiding to become a series with a continuous storyline.

The current story was about said catgirl, and it was delightfully close to the horror-stories that we saw in the first season of xxxHolic. The interesting thing is that it never tried to be anything big. The story was just very simple with hardly any unnecessary twists. A really good example of the simple, yet effective episode, and at the same time it foreshadowed Himawari’s arc some more. I suspect that the creators will save her arc for the end of the season.

I’m a bit iffy on the explanation the creators gave, on how the body of the dead girl has sat in her chair for years now, due to the fact that her body won’t decompose due to the chemicals that are in the food we eat. Even preserved meat goes bad if you don’t seal it to prevent outside air from reaching it, so why should a human suddenly become entirely immune to the process? Still, I admit it’s a freaky thought: perhaps the technology to completely preserve our bodies in the future.

Apparently, the creators also seemed to have cut out Tsubasa Chronicle references in this episode yet again. In a way, I’m glad that they did so. xxxHolic is basically a series about modern folklore, not some kind of back-up series for Tsubasa Chronicle. I’ve also heard from various sources that the Tsubasa Chronicle Manga is starting to get more ludicrous with every single volume, so it’s good that the creators have decided to keep things simple. I can imagine how there was a bit of collaboration between the teams that worked on the xxxHolic and Tsubasa Chronicle movie, but I can imagine how with so many references, trying to manage these crossovers will be near-impossible.

Ah, finally some action. This episode gave me some more faith in the second half of this series. The two previous episodes may have been rather dull, but this episode made up for it pretty nicely. Although I do hope that this series won’t try to beat Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in terms of huge mechas…

This episode also finally shows us the main antagonist, though the guy didn’t do much. Still, it’s a nice enough introduction, as long as the creators remember to develop the guy. I also liked the Varja-battleship that suddenly appeared. The only dull part in this episode was when Sheryll got sentimental about Alto in front of her audience, but at least that part was meant to develop both her and Ranka some more.

I like the new ED a lot more than the old one. I’m not a J-pop fan at all, so these songs have always been a hit or miss. This one turned out to be pretty nice, thankfully.