Glad to be getting some Senshi backstory coming up next episode. Looking forward to hearing more and learning about how he got his helmet (and its signature scratches). It’s pretty obvious that it will be a pretty traumatic tale involving a Griffon.

I believe this is the first time that we learned the Mad Magician’s name, Thistle. At least, if we heard it before I don’t remember it. The villagers might be in for a bit of hurt after helping Laios and crew, but at least our intrepid heroes managed to get out before Thistle showed up.

I think the standout thing for me this episode was the way that the animation was used to bring across both the serious and the silly sides of the show. When Marcy is flopping around while controlling her familiar, it is goofy as hell. When we switch to the familiar’s point of view, it is sakuga city with some stellar action animation. Such a fantastic way to use visual cues to complement the story. As an aside, I have been trying to streamline my clip creation process and quickly cut this clip of my favorite sequence this episode, Marcy’s second familiar.

If somebody out there does stitches, could I request a stitch of the panning shot of Laios creating his dual-headed dragon familiar? He looked a bit scary there for a minute…

Finally, I wanted to talk about Marcy’s skyfish. The shape instantly reminded me of a UFO theory I had heard before called rods. If you were to comb through my post history with enough scrutiny, you would find out that I have a PhD in physics. What that means in practice is that any time friends or family have any questions about something science related, they think I must know the answer. I bring this up because I was asked one time about these “aliens” called rods and what I thought of them. It is a popular enough theory that it has its own wiki page. Something I just noticed looking it up this time is that the theory seems to have garnered some cultural awareness in Japan due to the prevalence of Japanese media in the popular culture section, including Dungeon Meshi.