What an incredible adaptation of Melt’s big moment. I went back and checked out the manga to remind myself of how this was handled in the source material (chapters 57-58) and the anime takes this sequence to a whole new level. Melt had his own shonen protagonist climax moment.

Up to this point, this whole arc has been about the difficulty of adapting media from one form to another. Then, they bust out this episode that adapts the source manga in a way that utilizes animation that could never have been done in manga form. They even hand painted some of that sequence with actual oil paints (this is one of the animators’ accounts)!

This season had a bit of a slow start, but this episode has given me tons of confidence that the rest of this arc is going to deliver. My only complaint is that I really wish that Ruby and Mem weren’t relegated to being completely off screen through it all.