Kill la Kill - Episode 2

Come the end of the first episode of Kill la Kill, Matoi has won herself an opportunity to quiz her nemesis Satsuki about the death of her father - the trouble is, the amount of blood consumed by the school uniform which fuels her power means that she's also about toi pass out, meaning that she has to beat a tactical retreat.

Collapsing in town while making this mistake, Matoi is luckily taken into the care of Mako's family, including her backstreet doctor of a father - after patching up her wounds, feeding her and giving her a place to sleep, Ryuko has quite literally lived to fight another day.  A good job too, as it seems that Mako is in trouble for missing the academy tennis club's practice session, and crying off with an excuse like "I was kidnapped and held hostage" isn't going to cut it.

Rather than allow Mako to be subjected to a million tennis balls to face, Matoi stands up for her friend, but let down by her uniform she has no hope of standing up to tennis club captain Omiko Hatodate, who of course has a Goku uniform to boast as part of her position.  Defeated and left to float in a sewer, Matoi is rescued by her homeroom teacher, who tells her everything that she needs to know about her own so-called Kamui uniform (which she's named Senketsu, incidentally) and how to make it do her bidding - just what Matoi needed to face up to a rematch against Hatodate to save Mako from her fate.

As per its first episode, this week's Kill la Kill was a huge amount of fun - increasingly gratuitous in its fan service, yes (and it can only get away with playing so much of that for laughs before I have to call it out on that fact), but vibrant and filled with energy to move everything it does along at a break-neck pace.  The series so far has also managed to blend its action and comedy together quite nicely - this episode had a decent share of humorous moments (largely courtesy of Mako) which managed to complement the on-screen insanity nicely.  I still wonder whether the series will have a point where the story falls flat and the constant lunacy won't be enough to make up for it, but for now who cares about the story when we're having a ball watching this show throw itself around at a million miles an hour?