I guess either I or Yumekui Merry is out of whatever funk we were in last week, as I enjoyed this episode just fine. This is an odd little series, with highly original BGM and visual style. While the plot is nothing to write home about and the pacing some of the oddest and most maddening of any show I’ve seen for a while, the characters and sense of humor keep in interesting.

The whole series has pretty much been an episodic chain of dream-demon-of-the-week fillers, and while the format stays the same at least now we can see a light at the end of the tunnel as they start to creep closer to intersecting with the main storyline. Things pick up right where they left off, with the circus-like dream demon fulfilling his role of explaining things to the cast and the audience. His revelation that by killing him they would be destroying the dream of his human “hostage” was the key moment – it caused Yumeji to step in when Play was about to off the demon. There don’t seem to be many good ways out for our heroes – they apparently can’t send muma back to the dream world, and if they kill them they effectively kill their human vessels. As well, Merry seems to have gotten cold feet with the knowledge that she’s been killing muma rather than banishing them – I’m not sure she could do so now even if she wanted.

While Play/Yui, Merry and Yumeji are bonding and plotting strategy, creepy glasses-sensei has finally made it official that he’s a vessel for an evil muma, apparently Treesea. After wiping out the muma attached to the veterinarian-girl he proudly declares that Tachibana is his next target, which means that at long last the show is finally going to have to tackle the big questions. Treesea apparently neither fears or respects Pharos, so on top of everything else we may be about to see a full-on war between powerful muma with lots of human vessels as collateral damage. The wild card in all this is Kawanami – she’s a vessel too, though we’re not sure for whom. It seems to be one of the good guys, or at the very least a neutral. Yumekui Merry has already shown that it isn’t afraid to defy convention in terms of killing off characters, which adds a layer of suspense to things as we get ready to wrap up.