[Switchblade]

For some reason, the abandoned park setting is one of my most concrete memories from this phase of OOO.

I definitely also remember that this was the episode where it really hit me that we're just going to be keeping Date around for pretty much the foreseeable future. For context: back when the show was airing we kept getting rumors every few weeks that Date was going to be killed off and Gotou would become Birth. Date may or may not then come back like the dude in Movie Wars Core. But then another month would go by and Date was still here. I don't have any behind-the-scenes insight, but from some of the cast photos (I'll talk about the bunny hate eventually) we got it just seemed like Hiroaki Iwanaga was a really fun guy to hang out with so the show just kept him around a lot longer than initially planned. This episode, though, with the scene where Gotou refuses to put on the Birth belt, is where it really felt like the show was fully committing to Date.