Kill la Kill - Episode 7

What's a girl got to do to get some peace and quiet?  As if having her bath time interrupted by the peeping Toms which make up her surrogate family isn't bad enough, Matoi's lunch breaks at school seem to leave little time for eating in the midst of the constant attacks from low-rent school clubs desperate to prove their worth by defeating her.

As the saying goes, "when you can't beat them, join them", and with that in mind Ryuko has a plan - to create a club of her own as a launching ground to go on the offensive and take on every ever club president she can find.  Thus, Fight Club is born (I wonder what the rules are?) - a club that almost seems doomed from the start as Matoi threatens to be buried under paperwork, before neatly sidestepping any such responsibilities to hand the club presidency instead to Mako.

Needless to say, Matoi is pretty proficient at the whole fighting thing, and having a Kamui doesn't hurt either when facing off against single star Goku Uniform-sporting rivals, and before we know it Matoi, Mako and her family are propelled up the social strata, enjoying more and more luxury and finery as Fight Club's standing rises to the stratosphere.  Money and a life of luxury are not, however, a guarantee of happiness, and in the case of Mako and her family much of the simple happiness they once knew is lost, replaced by a lust for the extravagant and a determination to never slip back down into poverty.  Eventually, enough is enough for Matoi as she looks to quit the club - but will Mako let her, especially now that she's been granted a two-star Goku uniform of her own?

Some of you are probably sick of hearing people gush over this series by this point in time, but this week's Kill la Kill was a work of simple brilliance - there's nothing new about the story of this episode or the morals it purports to display, but that doesn't stop it being slickly delivered, laugh out loud funny in all of the right places yet still emotionally resonant enough to prove surprisingly touching even if there were no shocks to be found in the way the instalment panned out.  Kill la Kill could easily be accused of trying too hard at times, or simply spinning its wheels in the name of churning out its particular brand of insanity, but this episode felt like neither of those things and worked in the purest way possible to deliver perhaps the most entertaining single instalment of anime from this season, if not one of the strongest of the year.  Even from a series I've enjoyed a lot thus far, this feels like a standout moment from within it.