For my money that was clearly the best episode of Dragon Crisis since the premiere, and maybe period. It was well-paced, exciting, had a couple of nice hooks and tied up the Ai arc (for now) very neatly.

Turns out Furomori is a former Society member pissed off because they refused to let him use a lost precious he needed to save a female colleague, presumably a lover. He was part of an experiment to fuse lost precious with breakers – and so was Ai. Both their powers come from the lost precious embedded in their bodies – she was a normal human girl once.

And how does she know this? The pair of earrings – half of which was in Eriko’s possession – grant the wearer the ability to hear the truth behind the words of the person speaking to them. Thus Ai finds out that she was actually kidnapped 15 years earlier, and that Furomori basically thinks of her as a pet dog. She also finds out that Ryuji is trustworthy and wants to protect her – which he tries to do when Furomori catches them in the act of his attempted escape (with her help). Furomori has 5 LPs embedded and Ryuji, without a single LP on him, is no match for his wicked powers. Fortunately Rose, courtesy of Eriko’s insane driving, arrives just in time with the dagger and the battle is joined. Ryuji is still in trouble but Rose manages to free him with a sort of cleansing flame, which burns four of Furomori’s LPs away. Rather than allow himself to be captured by the hated Society he uses the fifth to immolate himself, leaving Ai in tears.

All that was played out really well – it carried a lot of dramatic impact. The same can be said of the little dramatic twist in the end, where Tokura informs Ai that she was in fact the kidnapped daughter of the Society member we met at the party – Makihara, the guy who was heartbroken when his child was stolen 15 years earlier. That was clever. Armed with the knowledge that she has a family after all, Ai goes off to Makihara – surely destined to return, given that she appears in the ED.

That was a very nice, solid, well-paced episode that did it’s job beautifully and featured some really nicely written material. I hope the rest of the series is as good as this ep was.