Recap: The war of words between Samon and Yoshino continues on. Meanwhile, the army is dealt a severe blow with Evangeline beaten and new fruits appearing. Who really did kill Mahiro’s sister?

Not much to speak of this week. With the fight between Evangelin and Natsumura over, and with the non-fight of Natsumura v. Jun all that remained, there wasn’t much action. It certainly did make up for it with talk-battling, though. Samon and Yoshino were bringing up the Death Note flashbacks like no one’s business with the back and forth reasoning. Eventually it simply seemed to devolve into an argument that basically reflected the chicken and the egg. Samon claims that the Tree of Genesis’s logic caused the events that killed his sister, yet Yoshino counters that it was his fault that Hakaze was there in the first place so that such events needed to be put into place, etc, etc. It did make for an interesting episode, and I have definitely started to cotton up to the lack of action. It really does show how well heavy dialogue can be done as long as the dialogue itself is interesting.

Once again, I really wish they’d tone down the Hakaze fanservice just a lil. I know, I know, I still use it in all my posts, but at this point its almost more in jest of how prevalent it is in the proceedings. I suppose it’s not a bad strategy to intersperse it with your dialogue bits so at least they don’t seem too visually boring, but man it’s every week with the stuff. While the wet T-shirt look of the past few episodes has passed, we still got plenty of full body angles, and multiple shots where they have her stick the doll in her cleavage. Unfortunately it would appear my qualms will go unnoticed, as knowing this show, there is a high likelihood Hakaze will be teleported through time naked in the next episode. They basically state it outright in the preview, but this was something I thought of the minute the idea of her teleporting even came into thought.

I was talking last week about how, what with this being an ongoing series, it would be difficult to continue this series with all the players and set pieces colliding together all at once. Admittedly, it would appear the anime is going on beyond this season. Still, this pair can only talk for so long, and the addition of another force was the only way to lengthen the story. Putting the killer outside this struggle between the Trees would accomplish this somewhat, but I’m still not sure how the story will continue once Hakaze returns to civilization. It is possible that with this new agent in the mix, the focus will once again return to the manhunt for Aika’s killer, but for now I’m genuinely interested to see how this show ends its first cour.