Guilty Crown - Episode 3

After impressing in terms of the power and organisational abilities at their disposal, Shu might have thought that he could finally distance himself from the Funeral Parlour group - at least that was the plan, until Inori appears in his class as a new transfer student and a red mark appears on my face thanks to my palm hitting it out of the clichéd stupidity of these development.

Of course, this isn't all that Shu has to put up with - not only is he going to have to share his classroom with Inori, but it also appears that he'll have to share his home with her two as she invites herself to stay in that detached, plain-speaking manner of which she is so fond.  There is, to be fair, a reason behind her entrance into Shu's life like this - during their previous operation, Gai identified a witness to their work outside of his control, and more importantly that witness is also a member of Shu's school.  So, how is he expected to find the culprit?  By extracting their Void and finding one which matches Gai's description (his power, incidentally, being the ability to know the shape of a person's Void before it is drawn from them).

Of course, this causes Shu not inconsiderable grief in the pursuit of their suspect, as not only does he have to memorise the rules of Void extraction (including the obligatory "you can only perform it on someone under seventeen" rule), but he also has to learn to make eye contact with people and, perhaps most importantly of all, not get caught doing it.  After some initial failures which turn his reputation to dirt around the school, Shu gets the hank of this whole Void extraction malarkey... but who is the witness to his deeds last episode?  Not only does his discovery of the culprit prove to be a personally difficult one for him, his fondness for the person in question could prove fatal...

After a really good episode last week, I'd probably best describe this third instalment of Guilty Crown as "functional" - it does its job in terms of progressing the plot and setting out a few important points and rules that the series will continue to carry throughout, but the way this information and progression is presented veers from the irritatingly clichéd (i.e. pretty much everything Inori does) to the pointlessly comical, with only its final scenes delivering an impressive kick to the teeth which makes some of what we've just seen worthwhile.  Still, even Code Geass had episodes like this, so as long as it doesn't make too frequent a habit of it I'm not going to let this put me off Guilty Crown majorly for the time being.