Well hooray, that episode actually turned out to be (almost) exactly
NOT the mind-grating frustration-fest that I was fearing. Cayenne's jackass meter, while still high, actually goes down a couple notches, and we
don't have some overdone "Wring it into Amata's brain" lecture on the gender seperation. I'm always up for good surprises, and this episode was one.
Unfortunately, while the OP is nice, it recycles quite a bit of scenes from episode 1, and they don't really quite fit.
Not really much in the way of development of course, being only episode 3, but we do find out the eyepatch dude is on the campus grounds (though he doesn't do anything), and Cayenne is Mikono's brother.
I'm glad they didn't stretch out the skirt issue with Amata and Mikono for long, though Amata probably should have chosen a better time to apologize than int he middle of a simulation, and thus failing the simulation battle completely with the whole student body was watching.
Then again, it's not like he'll have any other time to apologize at all, so....
And more thankfully, the Neo Diva leadership has actually already decided to employ the Aquarion in combat as needed, instead of giving us Amata a hard time and trying to seal it up again and again before finally realizing that they need it. (though the Aquarion didn't actually appear or have anything to do this episode.
What's got me revved up is next week's episode though; it seems we may already be getting the Aquarion Evol back in action, but even more importantly Mikono is already hopping into the cockpit next episode.
(though maybe just in simulation)
I'm so glad Kawamori and the staff decided not to make an annoying deal out of the whole gender segregation issue, though obviously the wall is still there. But it's not like it's being annoyingly drilled into our heads, and really, at this point the only character who seems to be annoying in the segregation issue is MIX with her strict "Men are ugly!" standoffing.
And another agonizing week-long wait for the next episode. >.>