Hjelmeland to Nedstrand

This one is puzzling.

Hitomi saves Van with another astral-plane-traveling thingy that doesn’t have any logic to it, and that no one discusses afterward.  The catgirl plays a crucial but accidental role in this.  Then there’s some more of the usual double-love-triangle dithering, and then another fight, but instead of a cliffhanger in the middle of the action, the catgirl jumps in front of the attackers and, since they’re also catgirls (but older, so… catwomen?) they go “oops, never mind” and bugger right off.

So, over the last couple episodes, Merle the catgirl has gone from a comedy bit player to a major influence in the plot.  And I gotta ask, why are we lending so much time to these other characters, while Hitomi herself just dithers about boys? She’s got a magical pendant with unknown powers, the ongoing mystery of why she was transported here, unresolved character development around her self-image, spontaneous visions of a destroyed city, and a scary future-predicting alternate inner self that it would be really fun to see more of. Instead we get tedious scenes of her wailing about her not-so-secret crush.

This show could be so much better…