[Fish Sandwich]

This was a stellar episode taken at face value. The direction was absolutely flawless (of course), the performances were great, the story is tense, and it has so much faith in itself there wasn't a mecha fight, but it really didn't come together for me too well.

Everybody seems to have their own reason why Nada dying sucks, but my biggest gripe is that the show specifically shows Koh about to use his magic healing ability to fix Nada, only for him to insist there's no time, and that Koh needs to go defeat the bad guy... right before he keeps on talking for a full minute. It launched me right out of being invested, and the emotional impact the episode was going for simply didn't land. It honestly would've been easier to suspend my disbelief if they simply ignored the Kagayaki Soul's existence entirely, but the real solution here only needed to be as simple as coming up with some throwaway line of dialogue to explain why that wouldn't work, like they already have before, when Asuna was in trouble a few episodes back.

Anyway, I do have to have thank this episode for providing a definitive endpoint to what I'll go ahead and call the Gaisorg Saga. I told myself I was going to wait until the end of it to comment, naively assuming it would be a trilogy at the most, but it turned out to be a sprawling, two-month, epic event debuting several pieces of merch, featuring the talents of Sakomoto's direction for three episodes and Kamihoriuchi's for two, back to back.

Overall I think it was a super strong batch of episodes. To the point where I can't even be too upset that the buildup Gaisorg got throughout the show was rather poor. Nada himself turned out to be an extremely fun character, even if I can't understand a word out of his mouth.