Outside of Pieta, Priscilla wanders off, and Lucky finds her sitting naked in a cave. She’s also eating some warm guts while crying about her family. Lucky wants to backstab her, but decides to try to reason with her about the wonders of a vegan diet. Meanwhile, in Pieta the Claymore gear up for a battle against overwhelming odds. Although some of the scrub Claymores are taken out quickly, the squads stick to the game plan and utilize some effective hit-and-run tactics. Things are going reasonably well until Ligardes decides to jump into the fight and take out all the captains. Thundercats, hooooo!
Veronica gets immediately cut in half, and Undine blocks the first blow only to have her arms ripped off and her torso severed. Jean realizes what’s going on and tells Clare to protect Flora. It is no use, though, as Jean takes an arm into the midsection and Flora is cleaved vertically by a dirty fingernail. Clare tries to power up, but is easily knocked aside, and now Miria is the only captain left.
The part with Lucky trying to get Priscilla to stick to her diet while she sobs and crams guts into her mouth was strangely hilarious, but out of place. Overall, things are looking bad, and this episode did a great job of illustrating the power difference between Isley’s forces and the Claymore army sent to buy time. Three of the captains are definitely dead, and Jean’s wound will probably take at least 10 minutes of the next episode to heal. It’s too bad that tactics can only take you so far in a battle against a vastly superior army. The turning of the tide reminded me of Denzel Washington getting owned at the end of He Got Game.
However, you have to give the Claymores a chance, even if it is a deus ex machina chance. After all, Ligardes is a terrible tactician. In spite of his talk about keeping calm, he entered battle after his forces took a mere 3 casualties. Then, he went against every basic rule of fighting and pulled his forces back in order to go one-on-one against the strongest enemy fighters. Everyone knows you crowd control the strongest fighters first and then focus fire to take out the scrubs quickly (AOE if you have enough firepower). We already know that the AO have some effective crowd control, so Ligardes officially gets an F as a raid leader.
This post was written by...
Kabitzin – who has written 1970 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
The name “Lucky” is really fitting because without a lot of luck, a dummy like him would have died long ago.
Priscilla’s power lunch was not in the manga.
Is it a plot device to drive Raki away; obviously he’ll land up in Pieta and possibly reunite with Clare. If so, he’ll convince Clare to give up on revenge. In other words, the manga comes out so slowly that a second anime season probably will not occur and they’ll want to wrap things up. I do hope we’ll get to see No.1 and No.2 in action, though.
And now Claymore is paying the price for having gone through the manga at mach 3 – they have to come up with some filler to complete every episode.
Besides the power lunch, they’ve managed to turn Ligardes from a fast, fearful opponent into a stupid guy that calls back his army before entering the fight and waits for Jean to charge her arm…
Of course, the claymores aren’t much better – they just keep watching while he’s going one-on-one against Jean.
Filler? With all due respect, what are you smoking? It’s a deviation to go for an original ending – yes – but a “filler” is something to kill time which has no bearing on the story. This is the exact opposite of a filler.
Kabitzin: 2 Intarwebs for the “WILL IT BLEND” caption ^_^
Well, whatever you want to call it, I do think that, not even considering the stuff with Priscilla and Lucky, there was a lot of time killing in the last 2 eps – added/changed scenes that don’t add anything, stretched scenes that kill the momentum, etc.