Recap: Mikoto begins her assault on the labs working on the Level 6 project. Still not aware of what’s going on, Kuroko can’t help but worry about her friend as she’s left to cover for her every night.

Jel’s Thoughts: It’s kind of surprising that Railgun is taking so much time to explore Mikoto’s friends’ perspective on this whole situation, but I suppose the series has always been about the entire group and not necessarily just Mikoto. While they do lay on the emotions a little thick, I like how Kuroko’s situation is making her normally flawless Onee-sama look bad. You can’t help but feel bad for her as she’s left to fight off the dorm head every night while being left completely in the dark about what’s going on. As I mentioned last week, Mikoto’s stubborn determination to tackle this huge problem by herself and ignore her friends’ feelings has put her well along the path to becoming the emotionally drained mess we saw in Index. Sure we’re ultimately just getting a POWER OF FRIENDSHIP message here, but at least it seems they’re taking the time to properly put the message together.

That being said I think the whole little side excursion with the little girl looking for a card for her friend was total overkill. They were doing a fine enough job getting Kuroko’s perspective across with her scenes at the dorm and working at Judgement. What this episode really needed was more explosions. Watching Mikoto smash things and perhaps making a few more horrifying discoveries about the project would have been a lot more relevant than the girls looking for clovers on the riverbank.

I did enjoy this episode as I like seeing the serious, responsible side of Kuroko come out every now and then, but they spent entirley too much effort on building up a relationship that’s already been well established. Fortunately it looks like Mikoto can’t just keep running around blowing things up without anyone doing anything about it, and I’m looking forward to seeing the incoming batch of new girls try to stop her. Just one step closer to that fight with Mugino we see in the OP…