The World God Only Knows Season 2 - Episode 10

The introduction of student teacher Jun Nagase has certainly thrown a cat amongst the pigeons for Katsuragi - as if "conquering" a teacher (even a student one) isn't a tough enough task, Keima now finds himself almost serving as the hunted rather than the hunter as Nagase tries to cure him of his constant gaming ways.

With this in mind, Katsuragi decides that there's only one thing for it - to try and piss off Nagase as much as possible with his behaviour; not just rebuffing her attempts to help him, but being a complete pain in the backside into the bargain.  However, not only do most of these attempts backfire on him, but Nagase also seems completely unaffected - indeed, before he knows it Keima is the one who ends up getting angry while Nagase is confused at best.

As he's making no progress, Keima decides that the only way forward from here is to conquer this "route" the old-fashioned way, but to his mind the only way he can do this quickly is to ally himself with someone in a position of greater power than Nagase herself - in this case, Keima's actual teacher Miss Nikaido.  Of course, even this proves to be more than Katsuragi bargained for, as Nikaido is no normal teacher, and he ends up learning nothing about his target.  Ironically, this should have been the moment that he was carefully watching Nagase instead, as her overly passionate attitude begins to show its deep-seated and painful cracks.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the opening to this story arc as it somehow felt a little fresh and different, it feels a little as though this instalment allowed the arc to slip into more traditional territory as it went on - come the end of the episode, we seem to be back to the usual story of troubled girl who Keima needs to rescue, which is far less interesting than Nagase's aggressive push to understand and help Katsuragi in the first place.  Still, that might not necessarily be a bad thing if the series manages to finish up this particular "conquest" strongly, and who knows, maybe there's still room for its remainder to revert to playing its dance of characters against type again?