Though this week’s episode featured a battle about as explosive as the rest of them in the series, it lacked the punch of episodes 2 and 4. The main reason for that is that, while the first two battles were tactical affairs that featured Iona’s crew out-clevering a superior force, this fight consisted mostly of Haruna holding off ground forces with a nanomachine double and some magic force fields. And some scenes of Kirishima fighting as a stuffed bear; to be fair, that was a pretty cool usage of a character who was overacted in the first place.

This week also saw a wrapping-up of the mini-arc featuring Haruna, Kirishima, and Makie’s newfound friendship. The whole arc was pretty standard “aliens befriending humans” stuff, and I don’t have too much to say about that. It’ll be interesting, though, to see how those three mesh with Iona’s crew as they all head towards where Takao is now being presumably imprisoned.