Saturday 25 December 2010

To Aru Majutsu no Index II - Episode 12

After a few hours of relaxation and Christmas festivities, it's back to the 'blogging grindstone again... oh, who am I kidding, I love it really.  Anyhow, onward to To Aru Majutsu no Index II and the continuing search for the Croce Di Pietro (which still sounds like some kind of delicacy to me, but I digress).

After doing some pretty serious and unnecessary damaga to Himegami last episode, it doesn't take long this time around to assert that all is more or less well with her once again - while still injured, it seems that Stiyl has done enough to save her life.  This turns our attentions back to the search for Oriana, meaning (yep, you guessed it) more random and occasionally aimless running around from Touma and company.  Oriana's own meanderings bring forth further questions about exactly what she's plotting, and this is unveiled as the episode goes on and we learn of the conditions required to activate the Croce Di Pietro.


Away from all of this there are brief moments in the spotlight for Misaka, Index, Touma's parents and so on, but none of these matter at all, serving merely as distractions from the bigger picture which only really steps up a gear as the episode comes towards its climax.

As the fifth episode of this story arc, you'd have thought there would be more going on by this juncture but we really don't seem to have recovered from the "lots of running around" disease that this set of episodes has demonstrated from the start.  This wouldn't be so bad if it felt like it had some kind of purpose or entertainment value, but really nothing interesting happens in this episode at all, and the only reason to even bother watching it is to be drip fed an extra little morsel or two of information to explain things which really could have been done last week without wasting this instalment on pointless bullshit.

If you can't tell by now, I'm officially bored with this story arc of To Aru Majutsu no Index II by this point - hopefully next week's instalment will be more interesting but even then I think I'm at the point of no return for this story; can we just move on to something more action-packed and exciting please?

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