This little miracle occurs after Kuniko is reunited with Momoko, just in time to (coincidentally) stumble across Lady Mikuni's solar eclipse playtime. Naturally, the nearby guards and Sayoko try to stop their escape (particularly in the case of Momoko, who they want to capture for some reason - "Should I capture her dead or alive?" queries one particularly slow-witted guard), leaving Momoko no choice but to make use of her special sexual harrassment moves.. plus, of course, the whip that can deflect bullets. Just in case you were still taking this action sequence too seriously at this point, Sayoko gets turned on in the middle of the fight and Kuniko's boomerang has a coming together with Miiko that had be laughing out loud with its comical hilarity. The upshot of all this is that Momoko is indeed captured, where presumably she'll be forced to sit and watch all the transsexual jokes she's made throughout this series as punishment.
Everything feels like a bit of a blur after the "intensity" of all this, but in short Kuniko escapes, finding time to meet up with Takehiko who is still digging in his ridiculous plan to save her. Luckily, although nearly three episodes too late his efforts aren't all in vain, as Kuniko joins him to rescue the rest of the girls in the prison, although of course as we already know they're all dead, a discovery which leaves Kuniko naturally distraught.
You know, the more I watch of Shangri-la the less I understand what they're trying to do with it - On the one hand we have harrowing scenes of a prison yard full of dead girls, yet on the other we have Momoko defeating guards by rubbing his/her breasts in their face. Shangri-la may not be the first show to mix humour and darkness by any stretch of the imagination (see my comments on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood's ninth episode for proof of that), but while some series pull off this juxtaposition admirably in the case of Shangri-la it simply feels embarrassing or otherwise entirely out of place. Whereas other series make you laugh when you know the comedy is deliberate, during this episode I occasionally found myself laughing and wondering whether the moment in question was actually meant to be funny, or simply a disaster of poor animation and dialogue. I'd like to try and be positive and imagine it to be the former, but... well, I just can't. I swear at one point (and it could just be the final vestiges of my sanity departing) I heard a cow mooing in the background, and somehow that bizarre and completely out of place moment sums up my bemused reaction to this episode perfectly. Moooo.....
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Anon