Impression:

I guess this episode was fairly interesting. Jinbei gets to go on a mission with Mugai, but it wasn’t really an introduction episode in the way that the last three were. Mugai’s character is pretty much meant to have a decent amount of mystery around him. Let’s take a second to talk about the bugs in this series. They draw them in some creepy ways. They fought fleas in this episode and we got some crazy tentacle vampires. They pulled out all of the stops with the cyclops eye and the circular mouth. I feel like they were just pulling creepy features off of an idea wall and called it a flea. Mugai was called away to handle an extermination at the house of an official and Jinbei was called in to help because he is the most expendable member of the group. That sounds harsh, but it is pretty obvious that Jinbei is not as strong as the other characters. The guys can’t even cut through the flea larvae. Even though he is the weakest, Jinbei fights with the queen while Mugai takes on the king and all of the babies. Once again, it may seem harsh, but Mugai thinks that Jinbei is going to die while fighting the queen. It makes sense because Jinbei kind of gets fucked up during his fight. Honestly, the guy should be dead. He takes a big hit while saving a servant and then gets impales by all of the vampiric tentacles. How the hell do you survive that? I guess that the plot armor is strong with this one.

I am glad that I have never had to deal with a flea problem.

Current Opinion of the Show:

This episode hit me in a really good way. I am not the biggest fan of the pacing because we are still on the introduction episodes, but I think that we are definitely done at this point. It looks like we are down to more adventure stuff and that is a good thing. The really good thing is the way that they handled Jinbei’s big fight. Before I get too serious, I am happy that he no longer yells out “always be ready for a fight” when he does his big move. The “Mt. Fuji Slash” thing is good enough. Kind of lame, but it at least sounds like an actual attack. Enough stalling. What I was really happy with was the fact that Jinbei basically lost his fight. Why does that make me happy? Jinbei is the weakest fighter and it would be stupid for him to be on the same level as everyone else after just a few episodes. Fighting like the others should take a lot of practice. They did this really good thing where they showed Jinbei being strong even in defeat. Obviously, Jinbei would be dead if Mugai was not there to clean things up because Jinbei was kind of dying from blood loss. However, he held down the fort long enough to avoid further casualties and he did survive the event. So there is a clear level of improvement on Jinbei’s part without having him skip a bunch of steps. It is something that I am not used to seeing in shounen. You almost never have to really train. You just have to be put into a corner and forced to awaken the strength that is within you. They tried to pull that with the aura thing that Jinbei had going on, but they did it in a nice way where they showed off the fact that the potential is there, but he still needs more training in order to unleash it. I am really looking forward to more fighting and possibly Oharu showing up and doing more than being the big breasted lady.