Guilty Crown - Episode 8

After all the stress of recent times, Shu probably deserves some time for rest and relaxation down the beach, and that seems to be exactly what he has planned along with some of his schoolmates as this week's Guilty Crown begins.

Of course, nothing is simple or relaxing for Shu these days, and this little trip is in fact organised at the behest of Gai, as he eyes another operation against GHQ and, more importantly, he needs a particular Void to do it.  That Void happens to belong to Souta Tamadate - someone who Shu doesn't exactly get on with but chooses to humour in the name of helping his comrades.

This, the plan is formed and it's left to Shu to pull his usual Void extraction bit, with the only troublesome element for him this time around the need to use Inori as bait for the besotted Tamadate - an issue which leads to him embarrassing himself in front of the rest of the Funeral Parlour's masses, incidentally.  Still, the Void is extracted, and the plan swings into action... however, it seems that for once somebody has managed to get one step ahead of Gai, and what's more he seems to have links (as does Gai) to Shu's father.

I'm not too sure what to say about this week's episode of Guilty Crown... oh wait, yes I am - it was formulaic, clumsily presented and really rather dull.  Now, I've enjoyed this show thus far for all of its flaws, but this time around it seemed that everything that has been poor about this series has come to the fore - there was no tension or excitement surrounding the week's mission, and Shu's part in proceedings has become far too much of a case of "rinse and repeat" to elicit anything of note either, no matter how cool the properties of the various Voids are.  Right now, Guilty Crown is beginning to feel like it would work better as a big budget video game than as an anime production.