[Fish Sandwich]

I absolutely adore that this episode's final revelation is also the very first piece of information it gives you -- Minami is an agent.

There's a cleverness to the overall structure of this one that reminds me a lot of back when Kureha was introduced. You have a fairly straightforward Dreamer plot going on where there's a surface-level excitement carrying things along, but rather than just outright discard that once the twist comes along, the twist actually recontextualizes everything you just saw to be more meaningful than it seemed like at first. A mission like saving a cat, or a scene like Nem asking Minami about her motivations takes on a whole new dimension, and you can go right back and mull over all that stuff a bit and start to see how the story will likely come together even before watching the second part. Absolutely killer episode on that particular front.

Even before factoring that in though, I also enjoy a lot about how that episodic plot ends up playing around with the show's old(?) formula along the way. It *is* an episode that plays out like a classic early ZEZTZ story, but the roles are all out of whack. Baku can't make himself sleep, he's still himself in the dream, and it ends up being NOX, of all people, who kinda does the usual Seven thing of peering into the Mind's Doors and swooping in using that knowledge to avert the bad dream. The simple matter of how weird it all feels is sort of intrinsically fun, but I also like how it allows the show to demonstrate how Sieg changes the dynamic in a more detailed fashion. I appreciate how visual-oriented this show is in general, so it's nice that on top of the way he abruptly changed NOX's dream, we specifically see him interacting with the Doors themselves and all that to really drive home that the previous rules of the subconscious mind don't have to apply when he's around. Even though it's probably pretty significant that Minami's original bad dream was of Baku being hurt! So even there, the episode is kind of drawing your attention away from something really obvious and important to remember in a neat way.

So yeah, I got way into this one. I thought it drew a lot of nicely intense emotion out of Baku, especially, and I'm excited to see how they tie it all together next time.