Recap: With the help of Senjougahara, the Fire Sisters, and a couple of odd characters loosely tied to the Golden Week incident, Hanekawa begins to piece together clues about the tiger. She realizes the incident must be resolved that very night.

Jel’s Thoughts: Senjougahara and Hanekawa, consulting supernatural detectives GO! Seriously, I kind of got a Watson/Holmes vibe from this week’s episode with Hanekawa out doing the leg work gathering clues and Senjougahara putting them together. That’s pretty much what I’ve been hoping for this entire arc, so it was cool to see that come together. I also enjoyed the introduction of the new characters, particularly Gaen and her “I Know Everything” swipe at Hanekawa’s trademark catchphrase. Monogatari villains are always fascinating as they’re never “evil” in the most black and white sense, so it will be interesting to see what she’s up to in later stories.

Introducing the oddly named Episode was a bit of a reminder that we still don’t really know what happened during the Golden Week that started this all, and with no news on the Kizumonogatari movie it may be awhile before we find out. I actually like the idea of leaving little clues here and there and letting us figure it out, but in this case I felt like we were missing out not knowing how much of a threat Episode may or may not have posed. Come on Shaft, get those Madoka movies done already so we can see what happened!

My other issue with this week’s episode was the language barrier as most of the clues involved the series’ trademark wordplay. Obviously I can’t fault the show for taking advantage of its native language, but without knowing the kanji yourself you just have to trust that whatever just happened was clever and cool. I’m willing to play along, but it was definitely an episode I wish I knew Japanese.

Despite being in the dark for portions of it, I still enjoyed this episode overall. Having the girls working on their own has done a lot for their characters, and now we have even more characters and hanging plot lines that will no doubt be important in future arcs. There was also something kind of cathartic about Hanekawa accepting and trying to contact her Black half, and seeing the normal, naive, human side of her has made her a much more likable character. Needless to say I’m really looking forward to seeing how things wrap up for her, presumably next episode.