The Seasonal Anime Draft: Cop Craft, ep 9

This week, Cop Craft gave us that swimsuit episode I was predicting, though it happened in a way I couldn’t have predicted at all.  A lot happened this episode. In fact, it’s really more like the bottom half of episode 8 and the top half of episode 9 (which also contains a little bottom half, if you know what I mean. (I’m talking about another fanservice shot of Tilarna’s butt.  Though it’s got nothing on last episode.))

They had to shove that pool scene in somewhere, so why not here

Summary: The writers apparently wanted to wrap up the “Tilarna switching minds with Kei’s cat” storyline quickly, because it gets resolved before the first half of the episode is done. Cecil and cat-Tilarna go to the dump, and cat-Tilarna leaps into a giant trash heap to sniff out the latena and find the crossbow that caused the whole situation. Cecil panics and calls Kei to tell him what’s happened, fearing the worst.  Tilarna finds the crossbow and runs after it, but she has to jump off a conveyor belt leading to a compactor before she’s ground into a paste.  The crossbow is crushed and Tilarna thinks she’s doomed to be a cat forever… but in a weird anticlimax, it turns out that the crossbow being destroyed broke its spell, and Tilarna and Kuroi’s minds are returned to their rightful owners.

Tilarna comes to in Kei’s apartment as she’s being beaten by Hellmandes, a federal customs agents I didn’t even bother to bring up in my last post. Hellmandes was bugging Kei over that missing crossbow throughout episode 8 and into this one for good reason — he’s also an artifact smuggler and is now demanding that Tilarna tell him where it is so he can sell it. Now that Tilarna is back in her own body, however, we know how that will turn out.  She beats the shit out of him, finds her sword, and is prepared to kill him before Kei shows up and stops her to place Hellmandes under arrest for smuggling.

The face you see before you die, unless you luck out and get saved at the last minute

This is where episode 8’s story ends and episode 9’s (?) begins, because we’re immediately sent to a vice squad pool party. We get a little pool/swimsuit fanservice, then Kei sees on the news that Kahns, a candidate for San Teresa mayor, has been shot by a Semanian terrorist. Zimmer sends Kei and Tilarna directly to the coroner to attend the autopsy of the now dead gunman (still in their swimsuits, despite Kei’s objections) and Tilarna smells latena on the corpse and says he was probably being controlled by Zelada, the Semanian mage they fought all the way back in episode 4.

Cecil is unimpressed by Kei and Tilarna’s attire.

On their way out of the coroner’s office, a passing cop insults Tilarna as a “damn alien” under his breath, and Kei chews him out for it in front of everyone. Kei and Tilarna have a nice emotional moment, and the episode closes with Kei predicting a lot more strife between Earth humans and Semanians, considering the fact that a Semanian shot Kahns and that one of the remaining mayoral candidates is a racist asshole who wants to ship them all off (and the other is Mozeleemay, the lecherous dickhead from episode 7.)

This was a dramatic scene, but all I could wonder was why the hell is Tilarna wearing a school swimsuit, complete with that hiragana nametag on front?  It makes absolutely no sense.  I bet Range Murata insisted on it.

Analysis: Getting the end of episode 8’s story out of the way: it really did feel anticlimactic. Turns out Cecil and Tilarna didn’t have to chase that garbage truck after all; they could have just waited for the crossbow to get crushed at the dump. Not that they knew that, of course, but it still made the story feel pointless. Or maybe the whole point of it was to justify all those scenes of Tilarna crawling around in her underwear last episode. If that’s the case, I can forgive them.

Speaking of fanservice, here’s that gratuitous butt shot I was talking about.  Pretty tame compared to episode 8.

The second half of this episode was far more interesting. The semi-disgraced Mozeleemay’s mayoral opponents are revealed — the one who seems like a halfway decent guy has been shot and is probably out of the picture, and the other is an anti-immigration zealot. This sets up an interesting situation for Kei, Tilarna, and their colleagues.  We know both of these guys are assholes, and both would probably give Tilarna a lot of problems if they won the election.

Kei and Tilarna also had a few moments that suggest something more might be going on between them at some point. Tilarna gets weirdly indignant about Kei not being angry that Hellmandes saw her half-naked, and she seems a little put out when Kei said he was “freaked out” by her crawling on him last episode when she was in cat mode. Meanwhile, Kei goes out of his way to yell at that cop who calls Tilarna an alien, then explains to Tilarna that when he calls her an alien it’s like when a gangster calls his girlfriend a “bitch” — it’s sort of a term of endearment. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I’m sensing some tsundere vibes coming off of both of them, though it’s a lot more obvious with Tilarna. Or maybe they’re just teasing us and nothing will happen. We’ll see.

We also get a scene of Tilarna being mad and pouty again, which is always appreciated.

That’s all I have for now.  See you next episode, and until then, stay safe.

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