Holy hell folks, we’re at the three quarters mark of the season. One of the sad truths of aging is that each week, season, and year somehow passes even faster than the last, but fortunately, at least this week’s cartoons were really excellent. Every single show I’m watching offered a fine episode this time; the combination of Carole & Tuesday having a slightly weaker episode and everything else excelling meant this week was pretty much an even line of solid entertainment from start to finish. They weren’t even the kind of straightforward “well that was competently executed” good that leaves me without much to talk about – they were good in exactly the convoluted, context-dependent ways that make for plenty of meaty critical interrogation. Let’s dive into the spoils then, as we break down another impressive week in anime!

Sarazanmai finally introduced some bold narrative shifts this week, as Toi’s brother forced the dish issue while our otter cops took their secret mission into the public sphere. There were lots of individual elements of this episode that I really liked – Enta and Toi’s brother, for instance, who developed a compelling rapport over a series of conversations that let each of them express a great deal of vulnerability. I was also happy to see the quasi-reveal of Reo and Mabu’s situation from last week lead into them actually participating in the show’s drama directly, as opposed to simply playing out their dance in the show’s usual structure. “They have a story and it is tragic” wasn’t really enough to make me care about these prior narrative ciphers, but seeing the interplay of Mabu’s sad appeasement and Reo’s almost frantic escalation out in the streets went a long way towards building them into sympathetic, conscious actors.

In contrast, Toi directly justifying his decisions in the language of the show’s own meta-commentary (“I want to protect my remaining connections,” etc) felt a bit more impersonal, but I suppose some of that stiffness comes with the territory for modern Ikuhara. Additionally, I remain uncertain of how badly my experience of this show has been undercut by this series’ apparently not-optional media mix, where if you’re not reading the supplemental manga and twitter feeds, you’re incapable of fully understanding the context for anything. This episode at the very least left me with more meaningful points of emotional connection within the series, while hopefully signaling the end of its limiting initial structure. Sarazanmai’s wasted a lot of time getting here, but its rich cast deserve a strong finale.

Carole & Tuesday experienced their formal debut on Mars Brightest this week, in an episode that demonstrated a variety of their show’s strengths and weaknesses. On the negative side, while Carole & Tuesday has always been a pretty farcical production, I felt this week’s extended focus on nonsense like the Fire Brothers was a lot less compelling than the show’s usual shenanigans. Watanabe’s comedy seems to generally benefit greatly from being as punchy and quickly relayed as possible – the guy isn’t actually very good with comedy, but he’s generally so great at pacing and direction that it doesn’t actually matter, since good jokes are often just mediocre jokes told well.

Additionally, I’m both eager to see and almost dreading where the show is going with its whole “Martian androgyny” concept. While the show has demonstrated a refreshingly forward attitude through characters like Gus’s former wife, its treatment of Angela’s mother has been far more ambiguous; whether that’s reflective of in-show or extra-show prejudice remains to be seen, but it’s something the show will have to address eventually.

Fortunately, there was still plenty to enjoy in these performances. Fire Brothers aside, Carole & Tuesday’s other competitors both offered excellent songs, with OG Bulldog’s rap opera succeeding both as a gag and as a genuinely great concept in its own right. And our leads’ performance was as strong as ever, with the animation taking particular care to demonstrate how much each of their performances feed off the others – they make each other better, and Mars Brightest’s judges clearly recognized that. Rough notes aside, Carole & Tuesday remains an incredibly satisfying production.

The finale of Bucciaratti’s battle against Sanctuary offered another satisfying dollop of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure action, evolving naturally across a series of self-contained action setpieces. My favorite sequence of this episode was likely the first act, where Bucciaratti and Secco used their Stands to complement their physical sparring in very close quarters. The clever use of nearby variables like poles, glass, and pavement made this fight feel tense and desperate throughout, as incredibly dangerous weapons narrowly swished past each other in the Stand equivalent of a knife fight. Secco’s rain of stone spears felt satisfying in a very different way, shifting from tense physical choreography to a fanciful but satisfyingly coherent extrapolation on his base powers. And Bucciaratti’s victory was predicated on exactly the kind of clever, lateral reassessment of the battlefield that you hope for from good fights, as he correctly defined the key variable of the fight as Secco’s ability to discover him through sonar. All in all, this was a JoJo Battle Done Right in a wide array of ways, once again demonstrating Araki’s profound mastery of his chosen medium.

And finally, Demon Slayer was tested to the utter limits of its aesthetic capabilities in an episode that demonstrated the full potential of ufotable’s CG-centric production methods. The show has occasionally employed CG character models for rapid moments of action before, but this episode’s frantic scrambling demanded far more dedicated use of the models, which the show tried its best to conceal through speed, distant staging, and masking variables like dust or wind. The results weren’t perfect, but they were on the whole successful – the combination of various mitigating visual factors, clean tactical focus, and regular flourishes of fluid traditional animation made for a thrilling battle that didn’t match ufotable’s Fate-related high water marks, but still felt like an exceptional episode of shonen action.

The weakest element of this episode was the script, as the descriptions and dialogue of this week’s enemies felt as boilerplate mid-tier henchmen as humanly possible. I don’t think I’ve ever accused Demon Slayer of being a well-written show, but its plotting and dialogue so far feel even below the level set by genre compatriots like Naruto and My Hero Academia, which isn’t a particularly high bar in the first place. It’s nice seeing Nezuko get more to do, but it’d be nicer still if the show’s plotting eventually became a genuine draw, instead of a perpetual hindrance.