Most of the first half is a waste, with a bunch of dithering townspeople and Hitomi being mopey as usual.  Then Van and Hitomi head out to meet Van’s brother, mister evil-for-no-reason.  Okay, standard plot movements.

But then just before the break there’s this wack scene where a Zaibach general is staring out into a garden and watches a pretty lady try to … eat a snail?  Because she’s too stupid not to?  And he’s all like, “What’s happening to Zaibach?”  What, everyone is turning dumb?

The second half is the very-much-expected heel turn by Van’s brother, suddenly realizing that the Zaibach ruler is, like, wrong and stuff, for slaughtering tens of thousands of people and burning cities and pillaging lands and consistently breaking promises and treaties and alliances, for freaking years.  Oh hey, you finally noticed!  But the real breaking point was when your two adopted catwomen died in your arms, after you personally shot them full of “extra luck” in some extremely dangerous experiment? If a totally amoral bastard decides to break from a totally amoral bastard because he doesn’t like what’s going on, is that really a break?

This guy has shown only one emotion – cold bitterness – in every line of every scene since the beginning, and that still hasn’t changed.  He’s a crap villain who made no sense without a backstory, and makes no sense now that he has one. He only has one valid move in this plot: He is absolutely going to martyr himself in due time. And when it happens I won’t care!

Come on, Escaflowne; four more episodes to pull this out of the toilet…

Well, apparently “extra luck” involves more than a blood transfusion.

You have to:

• Blot out the sun,
• Fire up a building full of weird clunky equipment, and
• Move geometric shapes all around in some inscrutable divination dance.

Crack a gasket on the wrong coolant pipe and the whole thing drops into reverse, and your luck-blooded troops suddenly have the worst luck ever.  Frankly, this whole side-plot about luck is garbage and should have been left out.

Hitomi is not abducted, thanks to a cracked gasket or whatever, but then one of the catwomen tries to abduct her anyway.  Hitomi reads her past through some touch-based mental divination, because — shut up she’s generally magical, stop questioning it! — and we get a repeat of the backstory we saw in the last episode, except with some seriously violent imagery of the catwomen’s parents being murdered, to spice it up.

I’m still watching, even after the crap that was episode 19, but I feel like instead of coming together, the show is unraveling even more.  Hitomi’s lesson this episode is extremely confusing:  “All this is happening to you because you’re a sad-sack, but the solution is not to change your feelings, it’s to embrace them, but only when those feelings are positive and about other people, and that includes your enemies and even people who are trying to kill you. Believe in them!”

Wisdom!

This one starts with a ceremony where the catwomen look like they’re about to make out – niiiiice – and then they get a blood transfusion to give them “extra luck” instead. 

Seems a bit late in the series to start futzing with the rules of the universe.  Not impressed.

Hitomi does a card reading and tries to alter fate consciously by swapping out a card, and though this should work in theory based on what we learned three episodes ago, it makes things worse. If the episode showed more detail on her inner life, it could have established that there’s some kind of battle happening between her conscious and subconscious self over what future she wants to create, which would be intriguing, but the director just doesn’t have that kind of skill.

At the very end she realizes she’s been selfish, publicly admits that she is in love with Allen, and takes charge in the only way that seems available:  By giving herself up to the enemy so they’ll leave her friends alone.  Okay, that’s bravery … of a kind.  We have six more episodes for her to stop having “mopey victim” as her default personality and for a few episodes it looked like she had actually changed. Now that’s in doubt. Will the show get her character to fully land on the other side of this, or will it wander away, like it has from so many other plot threads?