If I took this episode in a vacuum I'd actually rate it pretty good. However, since when did we ever consider things like that? I give it a 5/10.
We come into this third season after quite the atrocious season II. While not all of season 2 was bad, there were some good parts, there were some REALLY bad fuck ups, particularly with the ending that makes no sense. So JC staff clumsily puts together a third season where they quite nearly broke the story completely and delivers this episode to us.
Here's just some of the stuff they force fed us this episode that came off really badly.
- Yuiji disappears for some reason with a complete and utter lack of foreshadowing. Shana up to this point was the titular character, but she wasn't exactly the main protagonist.
- Yuiji has changed appearance and is with Ball Masque at the end. Didn't they defeat them at the end of season 2 in some craptacular anime original arc? Why would he suddenly join forces with them? Explaining this later means very little really since this comes off (To anime viewers, mind you i know the novels are different) as completely random.
- They throw us into a situation of emotional turmoil and expect us to care when this show hasn't aired in a couple years or more now.
- The Silver showed up and was killed or something in S2.... Or so we thought? Now he's still alive? Ok....?
- I remember vaguely Ball Masque attacking Outlaw or what not in S2 at some point, but with the meshing of anime original material this gets a bit convoluted in details, and they certainly don't help us anime viewers in trying to understand what's going on exactly too well.
- The anime original episodes disgraced the villains so badly, that I cannot even take them seriously anymore.
I'm sorry, but it's just plain insulting to me to deliver a story, that I actually very much like and enjoy, in such a manner. Their inability to write anything properly in S2 has really destroyed this show's true potential. There are so many inconsistencies in the plot details now simply because they chose to break them for no good reason.
This really felt like an episode I should be enjoying more than I did, so it's quite unfortunate to see this happen to what I thought was a pretty good series.