[LKK]

One possibility about the missing episode is that 13 episodes were produced by the animating company before they knew that only 12 of them were going to get timeslots for broadcast. In that situation, the animating company may have decided that episode 7 was the episode they could most easily skip without hurting the series' storyline too much. When the DVDs come out, the animators will insert episode 7 into the middle because (1) they've already paid to have the episode produced & don't want to lose the production money they spent. (2) They put the episode into the middle of the series because that's where it was originally intended to go in the original series plan and wouldn't make sense storywise if they put it at the end.

What I'm saying is that the fact that episode 7 was skipped may have nothing to do with conspiracies to entice the public to buy the DVDs or anything that was preplanned. It may be the result of circumstances beyond the animation company's control. There is certainly evidence of this happening in the American television industry. So why can't it happen in the Japanese animation industry?