Rating: B
As expected, a crisis is afoot involving the demonic appearances, and as some of the characters started to suspect last episode, Olba is connected to it. In the end, though, resolving the demon part of this affair seemed anticlimatic compared to the indications at near the end of the episode about who and what Amane is.
That Amane isn’t exactly a normal human was implied at the end of last episode, and this one confirms that she is the one who controls the fog and gave the demons a good thrashing. She’s also strong enough and/or confident enough in her power not to be fazed by the Enta Islans or present any actual threat to them, even though she clearly could. She’s got her task, and as long as they don’t get in the way of her task, she’ll let them take care of their business. And that task, it seems, is serving as one of the guardians to a sacred place of cleansing for the spirits of the dead, which seems to be the real purpose of her shack. The bigger revelation is her admittance that she’s “the daughter of Earth’s Binah.” In the Jewish Kabbalah, Binah is one of the highest-positioned sephira, which in this series’ terms means that her father is an incarnation of one of Earth’s Sephira, which probably puts Amane on a power level in line with Alas Ramus. Since Mikitty is her aunt, that means that Mikitty is likely an incarnation of another of Earth’s Sephira, too, and thus one of the most powerful beings on Earth. No wonder she could single-handedly thrash those demons!
The reference to “find the Daath of your word and restore it to its true form” is also interesting and another Kabbalah reference. In the Jewish Kabbalah, Da’at is the unity of all of the sephira into one, where they all exist in their perfected state. That suggests that Enta Isla’s metaphysical issues run much, much deeper than any but the angels know and that whatever the angels are doing is interfering with the delicate balance of Enta Isla’s Tree of Life far more than just a Sephirot being shattered into fragments would indicate. In other words, these are significant pieces to the overall story’s Bigger Picture.
The more immediate concern, though, is dealing with a bunch of demons which have been fooled by Olba into coming to retrieve one of two sacred swords – i.e., Better Half. (But where is the other one, then?) Between the efforts of Emi and the Devils in empowered form, that matter gets resolved almost too easily, though Maou will no doubt have future consequences for implying that Emilia has fallen under his sway. That scene and a later one where Maou may or may not have intentionally made a double-entendre when he said he was going to “dominate” Emi recapture the cheekiness which made the first season so fun, as does the revelation that the short sword was actually Maou’s missing horn for his Devil King form, but I cannot help but feel that the episode, overall, lacks some punch, hence the reason I cannot give it a stronger grade.
This concludes the adaptation of novel 4. With episode 8 and a return to Sasazuka, the adaptation of novel 5 should begin.
USA Anime 