For starters, this episode fast forwards us five years into the future, and a world where all Tomoya does is eat, sleep and work, and when he has nothing better to do smoke and drink - Like father, like son you could say. In the meantime, young Ushio is being looked after by Akio and Sanae, so Tomoya barely sees her at all.
However, Sanae et al have clearly decided that this really isn't the way things should be moving forward, and thus Sanae draws Tomoya into a plot where he is left alone with Ushio, leaving him no choice but to care for her. Of course, he does this in a clueless, uncaring manner, just about scraping by at feeding and looking after his own daughter before the episode closes with him finally deciding to take her on the trip Sanae and Akio had intended him to take her on in the first place.
While I was more than a little relieved to find that this episode wasn't as relentlessly depressing as I was expecting, it was hard to reconcile the "new" Tomoya with the guy we've grown to love throughout Clannad up to this point - Somehow, the change from the really rather caring guy who he was into the asshole we see before us here is a little too hard to believe, even taking into account Nagisa's death. I realise his inner turmoil and hatred is supposed to be clear for all to see, and I realise that the parallels to his father are deliberate, but despite that it just doesn't quite feel believable to me. Aside from being distracted by Ushio's occasionally cute behaviour, it was this thought that bugged me somewhat throughout the episode - Perhaps I'll manage to resolve those doubts internally by next episode and perhaps I'm being too naive, but at the moment Tomoya's personality change just rings a little hollow as a step too far in that particular direction to me.
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