Recap: After some hijinks, the crew splits up and Aladdin makes his way towards Magnostadt, where he just happens to run into another one of the Kou royal family.

Zigg’s Thoughts: Ugh. There’s not really any way to slice it, this was a bad, poorly paced and badly executed episode, and seeing it was a real kick in the teeth after the substantial strides I felt Magi made last week. Let’s start at the beginning, which is utterly inconsequential and could easily have been cut. Worse, by trading away Morgiana’s genuine sadness at Hakuryu leaving in favour of a cheap joke you’re damaging the emotional fallout of one of the season’s best moments so far. Worse still is the following joke, in which Alibaba and Aladdin attempt to ditch Morgiana so they can go and hang out in a brothel. It’s clearly meant to be a nudge-and-wink ‘boy’s own’ joke but it just makes them look like complete bastards and goes on for way too long, culminating in a punchline anyone could have seen coming a mile off.

The back half is much better, as we (finally) get our heroes underway on their individual journeys, and Alibaba’s sendoff gift to Morgiana is a sweet moment. Still, there’s some severely lacking execution here, mostly concerning the presentation of the Kou prince Ren Kouha. Now make no mistake, his introduction is excellent, effortlessly wiping out a bunch of bandits in cold blood, grinning maniacally and toying with them in a vaguely disturbing manner. It’s what comes after that I feel is a little off kilter. The show is clearly aiming for him to slot firmly into ‘psychopathic manchild’ territory, but he’s almsot too affable. Despite the clear demonstration of his power, there’s not much threat emanated. I think this is mostly due to the decision to present his odd sub/dom relationship with his lady servants as a comedic thing rather than the weird, vaguely sadomasochistic affair it seems to actually be. The voicework isn’t great either, and together I find I’m not really threatened by this new arrival. There’s potential sure, but I think the presentation here was a misstep.

 Aside from all that, we’ve also spent another entire episode essentially moving from one place to another, and considering we’ve been doing that for basically the whole season now, it’s already past the point of tedium. I pray now we’ve arrived in Magnostadt the actual plot can kick into gear, otherwise this is going to continue to be something of a slog.

Random Observations

• The musical montage where the trio eat, drink and be merry is sort of charming, but I’ll point out this episode contains two montages, a sure sign of padding.
• Horrible, horrible CGI water ahoy!
• Aladdin’s magic gem that allows him entry to the city is the very worst kind of plot device – the McGuffin that has such a specific purpose it seems expressly designed to solve this one problem.
• Iro’s Note: The ugly hostess from Season 1 was named Elizabeth, and the one from this episode is named Margaret. Persona shout-out? You decide!

Iro’s Thoughts: And thus we finally, finally, finally reach Magnostadt. It only took seven episodes and what, a dozen travel montages? The start of the episode is definitely jarring, with the main trio suddenly partying hard after being all sad that Hakuryu left, and it’s even more jarring to have Alibaba ditch Morgiana to hang with the whores after she refused Hakuryu to hang with him. It makes the hero seem like an incredibly self-centered ass, a definite contrast with just last week where he was blubbering at the injustice of the pirates’ situation.

We also meet Ren Kouha, whose red hair labels him as Kougyoku’s brother and who’s introduced via literally butchering a group of vagrants. I mentioned last week that Magi wasn’t too shy about being gory, and we get some more of that. In any other context this guy would be a clear villain, but as Zigg mentions, he’s a little too friendly for someone we’re ostensibly supposed to view in a negative light. How many villains would spend down time braiding the hero’s hair? Still, for such a striking introduction, he’s mostly out of the picture by the end of the episode. We had to stick him in somewhere, I guess.

The last major plot is Aladdin finally reaching wizard school, sneaking in by hiding his powers as a Magi through a convenient magic tool. It’s not a shonen manga without power limiters, it seems. It’s a decent enough way to enforce him to learn magic under his own power rather than with his super main character powers, but the in medias res bit from the first episode this season has already spoiled the fact he’s going to remove the gem at some point. Who’s ready for a training arc?