Any attention-paying viewer will probably have caught this episode’s major plot twist unsubtly foreshadowed in the OP. I did not.

Seriously, I thought that that pony-tailed guy was that bomb dude, the one who kept blowing up his comrades in the first season. Don’t as me why, but I never expected this episode to turn LIN into the new Greed, but it really came as a surprise to me when Father popped up a Philosophers’ Stone and used it on the guy. Now this explains a lot about why Ishbal needed to be sacrificed: they were intended to be the bait for the next Greed, since the previous one ran off. Now apparently, you need to get rid of first Greed’s body first, before you can create a new one.

Also: Father. How completely different from an evil overlord he started out, personality-wise. He’s actually behaving like a nice grandfather, until Ed and Al make clear that they have no intention to cooperate with him. What’s even more peculiar is that while he knows Hohenheim, this guy seems more like some sort of distant relative to him, even though Hohenheim’s dream hinted that the two hate each other.

That room had even more unexplained things: for some reason, Ed and Al’s alchemy didn’t work, and for that matter no alchemy was supposed to work, and yet Scar wasn’t bothered by it at all. Then there’s also Father’s Philosopher’s Stone-like alchemy, but my theory of that is that he’s got a whole bunch of Philosopher’s stones living inside of him, which also keep him immortal.

What’s also interesting: this episode introduced a second door-thing. Lin’s case isn’t just a matter of simple brain-washing, and something tells me that like with the Heaven-like door in which Al is still waiting for Ed, Lin is also still somewhere inside that Hell-like door. If that’s true, then what about the first Greed? And Wrath?

Also, in this episode I discovered that this show has been showing plot twists after the ED. And it’s a good thing I did this time, because Gluttony died inside of it. Agh, I hate it when series pull these things, because I always skip next-episode previews. Did this series do this more often, or was this the first?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Well, for a moment it might have seemed that the excessive hinting from the creators would ruin the surprise. I’ve said this many times before, but the baseball matches of Cross Game just don’t match up to those of Touch, in which you hardly ever knew how a match was going to end. Cross-Game instead just kept hinting at how this match was going to end throughout the first half of this episode, but nevertheless the eventual result hit hard.

So yes, Kou eventually suffered in his left arm, causing him to miss the crucial pitch that gave away the game. With this, he finally became a mortal again. Granted, that new pitcher was entirely fresh, and had only been playing for two rounds, but it’s nevertheless a mistake that could have happened with any other batter. And there’s the strength of the team they had to face: they didn’t just have good batter and pitcher, they had two of each. Individually, these people don’t match up to either Kou or Azuma, but when their strength is divided over half a game, they become a very formidable opponent to beat.

The aftermath was well delivered. You can see that the creators really took some time to let this sink in, and show Kou’s disappointment in his loss, even though nobody really blames him for it (after all, he did nearly win from the top-rated team in the area). It was also hilarious to see Senda, having been abandoned by the bus. ^^;

And at the end of this episode, we finally see Wakaba 2.0, and with that we move to the second half of this series, if I’m not mistaken. The characters really have been fleshed out enough by now. It’s time to develop them!
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Yes, with this episode I’m sure of my Top 3 of the autumn season: 1) Aoi Bungaku, 2) Armed Librarians and 3) Darker than Black. Kuchuu Buranko is indeed awesome, but it’s only awesome for its style, not its substance. Aoi Bunagku is awesome for both its style AND substance. This episode really was the best I have seen during this season so far.

The previous episode was meant to be confusing, it seems. This seems to be a pretty big story in this series, and this episode really started to explore his youth. My assumption is that the childhood friend of his later grew up to be that cartoonist, with whom he remained friends. We still don’t know exactly what drove him to commit suicide in the first place, though. That’s probably going to be saved for the next episode. All we just know is that he was bullied a lot during his youth, and something has been bugging him, ever since he survived that suicide attempt.

With a title as “no longer human”, I thought that this was going to be a supernatural horror story. Instead, it seems to be a story about a man losing his humanity. The way in which he survived the suicide attempt seems to have just been the final straw. After that, he starts to have visions of some sort of drawing he made when he was a kid (that was that strange black figure that showed up in the previous episode, signifying that it’s been there, even before the suicide attempt).

This episode introduces a woman who I think works at the local newspaper, however the way she collects bread crusts for her only daughter (her husband seems to have died) seems to show that she’s not paid well. On top of that, what was she thinking, trying to commit suicide? In the next episode, we’ll probably see how she’s going to fit inside the story. That cliff-hanger didn’t promise anything good: the lead character has accepted his hallucinations for what they are, and stopped paying attention to them, and yet he walked towards this woman in the end.

I also love the use of background music in this episode. It’s really simple, but compared with the awesome visuals it really manages to create one of the best atmospheres this season.
Rating: ** (Excellent)