Zankyou no Terror finishes its third episode without heading back into Stupidburg! Hooray! Nah, not really. This has been the least offensive episode so far though, I’ll admit. It was entertaining and didn’t take so many blatant liberties with logic and practicality that I didn’t absolutely hate it. 1 for 2 there, series. You really gotta do better than that. I did roll my eyes more times than I would care to count. Let’s do that now, in fact:

• The police recount their general incompetence, thus reminding the reader how everything in this series could be stopped by the use of grey matter. Aizen Sousuke the Younger is also taking some huge risks, here. How could he ensure the cameras in the police station wouldn’t catch a clear glimpse of his face? Everything he’s done to this point is risking the viability of whatever Grand Plan he has. I also like how the writers just conveniently forget to mention how many scores of innocent people that bombing undoubtedly killed. Yep, just slides under the radar to create deliberate sympathy for these terrorists.
• The terrorists managed to get a crane worker to cut the power by giving him money through dummy accounts. How do they know how to do this? Do they have someone on the inside able to manufacture fake accounts and make money transfers through them? Because that’s the only way you could do that. And if they did, the police could just, you know, trace the person who did. Follow the fucking trail, police. Do your goddamn jobs.
• Aizen Sousuke the Younger somehow faked an identity in the government and worked at a nuclear waste facility for three months. …………no. Just no.
• Aizen Sousuke the Younger is deliberately trying to draw people out. Probably someone from within the government who’s responsible for terrible, terrible things.
• Aizen Sousuke the Younger has tinnitus and doesn’t want to tell anyone about it. Boooooooooooooring.
• Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup, the two terrorists really were raised in some Unit 731-type environment. My eyes took a vacation with my optic nerves when I heard “for those of you who have been abandoned, love does not exist.” Like, way to strap a bazooka to the anvil you’re brandishing and go to town, writers. Subtle.
• Oh, the fat nerd helps solve the riddle conveniently with a timely video game reference. What if he had just been playing Candy Crush at the time? There goes another bomb. By the way, do you know how insulting this would be if it were on an American TV show? Yeah, it’s just as insulting here too. But no, the otaku won’t care. I’m sure of it. Because it’s anime, and anime always gets off scott-free.
• Lisa has mother issues. WEEP. Hey, maybe you should devote some actual screentime to this main character of yours? I heard that’s something stories do, you know: develop their characters beyond cardboard tropes. We get it. Lisa’s life is fucked up. Her mother also likes to violently shake her. We don’t need another episode showing us this in anvilicious detail, okay? That’s what happened last episode.
• Once again, we have an elaborate riddle that only Shibazaki can solve that’s again related to Oedipus. I really hope Oedipus is just a thing the writers have a boner for and it doesn’t play a part throughout the whole series. Like having Lisa being the offspring of incest or something. That would be dumb. They probably won’t do that, but given the scripts I’ve seen so far…
• So yay, the terrorists lost this time. Too bad there was no consequence for them whatsoever. Like something that might lead back to them.  You know, a mistake? Something that might get the tension going? No? No. Okay. Yawn.

Some good points for this episode:

• Shibazaki is a second-generation hibakusha, an atomic bombing survivor. That’s a nice touch to his character. By the way, I’ve been to Hiroshima: it’s not filled with old people. Looked like a normal town to me.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. This episode was bad; it just wasn’t as bad as the previous two. There are just so many things wrong with this series that I can’t possibly go into them all without killing many innocent virtual trees. This is the hellhole where serious anime go to die, kids. I can only commend the series for, as of yet, having no fanservice or other magical girl shit that just offends my soul in every way, but if this mess is the best “mature” anime can do now, I’m just going to cry in a corner. Even Death Note was better than this, and its plot made no sense either. It worked because the characters were interesting and the series really focused on them at heart; the plot was just a means to get Light and L to do crazy things and fight each other. There was tension and drama of some kind there, a conflict that at least tried to pull you in. On the other, lonely end of the spectrum, Zankyou no Terror has nothing. It’s so fucking boring and dull. It can’t even be pretentious like Death Note.

See you next boring time.