And Dan’Ichirou now joins the ranks of anime’s hall of crap excuses for fathers.

Seriously, that guy is messed up. We know from the first episode that he takes pictures of poor Rea every year on her birthday to “record her growth”. What’s worse is Rea is expected to be in the nude while doing this. After the events of the last episode being revealed to Dan’Ichirou (with her sneaking off into the night to see and help Chihiro) he deems it appropriate to not only restrict Rea even more, but also give her some slaps to go along with it. So now in this episode, she’s in complete house arrest – no school, no friends, and even not being allowed to go outside.

The mom isn’t any better though. She gets a bit more screen-time in this episode but that was all the time we needed to see how she’s no better than her husband. She just cares about her reputation as Sanka High’s chairperson. We do however, see some animosity between the couple, which will be played upon in the next couple of episodes.

Dan’Ichirou’s wrath doesn’t stop with Rea’s incarceration. Nope, instead he orders his men to hunt down and castrate Chihiro. Upon overhearing this Rea rushes to find and warn Chihiro of what’s to come. In the meantime though, Chihiro is ecstatic to have Babu back into the realm of the living…sort-of. Yes! The potion did indeed fulfill it’s purpose. Our ice-chest cat is now up-and-about, much to the bewilderment of Mero and Ranko. Throughout the episode Babu finds his way to some hydrangeas near the abandoned bowling alley, which was also near the cliff where Rea almost fell off.

Coincidentally, Rea was painfully making her along the mountain-ridge in hopes of finding Chihiro at their usual spot. Of course, Dan’Ichirou is on her tail and attempts to take her back. Rea finally shows some resistance though, but is quickly diminished when her father decided to just use force. In an unexpected manner, Babu kinda came to Rea’s rescue by leaping to the ridge and surprising Dan’Icihirou (apparently, he’s allergic) Rea recognizes him immediately and deduces that Chihiro’s elixir must’ve worked.

In an attempt of saving his daughter from being sullied by an “ugly cat”, he takes out a..short whip (? I honestly don’t know what it’s called as) and tried to take a swipe at Babu. In the last second though, Rea takes the hit and she falls off the ridge, takes another horrifying hit from a tree branch (which was already very suspicious looking from the first episode) before landing on the hydrangeas.

The result – zombie Rea! …along with an almost amusing combo of black sensors and blurs. I was expecting some entrails like from the first episode but a TV-broadcast can only show so much. With this the story is gonna get more interesting. Are Chihiro’s fantasies of a moe-zombie romance finally coming to fruition? We’ll find out soon enough.

Oh, and I’ve now realized that Ranko is in fact cute in her own way :3