This is the last episode of Shana’s past. They pretty much just wrap up a lot of the loose ends from the previous two episodes. Not everything was resolved, but enough of it was to enjoy this last flashback episode without wondering what was happening. We find out Shiro’s identity and the truth behind Tenmokuikko. I personally found 3 episodes to be one episode too long for flashbacks. It was nice to get the backstory and whatnot, but I think they could have condensed it down to 2 episodes. With 3 episodes devoted to Shana’s past, I wish they had more scenes with Vilhelmine.

At first glance this episode doesn’t seem to be all that unique in terms of what we’ve seen so far. There are two notable developments in this episode though. First, they’re starting to wonder how Hajime is able to find where their next “client” is. Tsugumi may have been able to provide an excuse when Hone-onna asked her, but sooner or later they’ll catch on. The other point worth mentioning is Ai seemed to show some sympathy in this episode. If Ai continues to change the way she seems to be, it will make for some interesting story down the line.

This episode pretty much dove right into the plot of the episode when the girls’ underwear along with Ayumi’s pendant got stolen. With a premise like that I was hoping for some funny scenes to follow suit. There were humourous scenes here and there, but they weren’t exactly anything to rave about. That was untill we got closer to the end of the episode. Late in the episode we see 9 Peeping Toms which looked pretty funny. The best part was the “leader” of the bunch who was blatantly a parody of Jyaian from “Doraemon”. Seeing that part made this episode totally worth watching for me. I can only hope they will include more parodies in future episodes. There is some actual development as well. We see two brand new characters, but they pretty much only had one line each. By watching the preview for episode 5 we do find out that one of the new characters is a witch hunter.

We don’t find out what the three individuals that captured Orihime are. All we learn is that they are Claud, Nova, and Ririn. The three of them end up capturing Chad as well. At this current time we still don’t know what their motives are for capturing Orihime and now Chad. For an episode that was supposed to be serious they manage to throw in some humour. It may not be side-splitting humour, but it had its moments. At the moment this filler arc can go two ways. They can either make it something intense or a snore fest. It will pretty much depend on the next 1-2 episodes to see if this arc can compare to the arcs based on the manga.

A new character is introduced in this episode. Yamame is a ninja from Mamoru’s mother’s village. Luckily the kind of humour that was in episode 1 is back. Things will be ok as long as they don’t give us another episode like episode 2. We learn that Mamoru was traumatized as a child and is now terrified of bears. Seeing Mamoru like that reminds me of Ranma and his fear of cats. I do hope they stop using the same villain over and over again, it’s starting to get old. Based solely on the first 3 episodes, this series doesn’t seem as good as “Dokkoida?!”. Since one of the creators of that series is the creator for this series I was expecting a similar level of humour. I’ll just have to keep watching and hope it can become comparable to “Dokkoida?!?”.

I didn’t think we’d get another filler episode at this point in the series. I must say that I really enjoyed this episode though. It’s probably one of the most hilarious episodes of the series so far. It was hysterical to watch the crew play soccer. One of the best parts of the episode was when Renton wasn’t able to pass the ball because he had only played soccer by himself before. There were quite a few other pretty hilarious scenes in this episode. If they could have given us more episodes like this earlier on it would have been nice. It seems a bit too late in the series to have anymore filler episodes. Well, they could fit 1 maybe 2 more filler episodes in the series without hindering the story.

This episode was entirely about Okamura Akihiro and Jahana Mao. Through a series of leads Okamura ends up meeting Mao. It’s definately an unexpected partnership, but they’re off to find Saya and Kai. Okamura and Mao are heading to France while it looks like Saya and the others are in Russia bound for Siberia. I wonder how the story will play out to have the two groups eventually run into one another. At this point it does seem like this episode was sort of a waste. Okamura and Mao don’t exactly appear to be such important characters. Of course that seems to be changing right now.

It looks like we’re going to get one episode per character if this episode and the preview for next week’s episode are any indicaiton. There really wasn’t all that much character development for Yuuki considering this episode was pretty much dedicated to her. The only real development we see is how Yuuki feels about Tomo. The only scene that really stood out for me was the photo shoot. After that the rest of the episode wasn’t all that intriguing except the end. I liked how they threw in a bit of humour at the end to lighten up the mood when Yuuki was teasing Tomo.

The beginning of this episode continues where we last left off with Saber fighting against Lancer. Once again the fight sequence was quite short. For now I think that isn’t a bad idea considering we don’t know all that much just yet. The situation becomes clear in this episode. The latter half of this episode was pretty much spent on having the rules of the war explained to Shirou. After learning that the fire from 10 years ago was a result of the previous war, Shirou decides to participate in the war. Now that we know what’s going on, we’ll be able to enjoy future episodes without having to wonder what is happening. I’m hoping for way more scenes with Saber in it from this point on.

The beginning of this episode was hysterical in my opinon. Seeing Rose, Roy, and Solty all confide in Miranda and Kasha was pure gold. Roy seems like a different person now since he found out Rose is quite likely his daughter. After spending some time thinking things over, Rose decides to accept Roy as her biological father. Just as she finishes telling Roy, she gets critcally wounded. It may look like she’s dead, but it seems highly unlikely they would kill her off one episode after finding out the truth. Quite frankly it would be utterly stupid to have her die when we’re just around the half-way point. With that being said, I’m interested in seeing how Roy will deal with this situation.