Recap: Grandpa sends The Mediator on a errand to pick up The Assistant, but he’s nowhere to be found. She runs into a fairy, after which there are bananas and cloning and/or time travel involved. I have no idea what is going on anymore.

Jel’s thoughts: I found this episode almost impossible to follow and to be honest, a bit boring. I am SO sick of any kind of time travel or manipulation, and having to sit through basically the same sequence of events several times in one episode is always frustrating. Still, I’ll give them credit for using time as a much more unique method of cloning than I was expecting. I’m not going to pretend I fully understood what was going on, but it seemed like a clever use of the fairies’ apparently god-like powers.

I’m not clear if this arc is going to be another bold statement by the author or if we really are settling into the misadventures of The Mediator and her Fairy Friends. The Mediator does say rather bluntly “cloning is morally wrong” in the beginning of the episode, but I can’t tell if that’s the actual message here or if that was just a standalone jab at popular opinion. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. If so, they would be removing Humanity’s teeth, once again turning it into a bizarre, fantasy mystery series instead of the biting satire it started as. While last arc proved that could be entertaining, I will be disappointed if that’s really the case. The fact that it wasn’t afraid to have a message was more impressive to me than Loaf-chan ripping himself apart, I’d hate to see that go away. We’ll see next week as the circumstances are hopefully explained.