As you know I’m pretty tolerant when it comes to production quality if the narrative side of a show is working, so it has to have been pretty bad if I’m leading with it.  I’ve expressed my unease over Cop Craft being produced at Millepensee, a studio that’s produced some of the ugliest anime of recent vintage.  But the first two episodes of this one looked pretty good on the whole, which seems to have been the calm before the storm.  Whatever else I took away from this episode what stands out in my mind is how crappy it looked – all the still shots, the jumpy animation, the off-model character shots.  That was a big dive from one week to the next.

It’s certainly not encouraging to see a cratering like that in the third episode, but whatever happens on the production side will happen – we’ll just have to wait and see.  The episode itself was also the weakest of the three so far for me, though more a mixed bag than a misfire.  There just wasn’t a sense of cohesion here – too much happening in one ep for starters, and it all felt kind of strung together.  But there were still some interesting moments scattered throughout.

At least we’ve didn’t have to wait long for Tirana’s loose cannon tendencies to get her into trouble.  She goes to Biz O’naill for help in infiltrating Deenis Elbaji’s club, and he dresses her up like an underaged escort for the occasion.  Fortunately Biz’ henchman gives Kei a call to let him know what’s going down, because though Tirana does talk her way into a meeting and Elbaji, it ends with her stuffed into the back of his car and whisked away to his hideout in the “Hightails” (which I gather is the badlands on the fringe of faerie territory).

Elbaji had mid-boss written all over him, but Cop Craft certainly didn’t waste any time in getting him out of the way.  We got to see Tirana in combat here, and once Kei brings her back her sword, she’s more than a match for Elbaji.  But at this point Zelada (who’s revealed to be the person who wiped out Kei’s unit during the war) has already fled with the fairy bomb, with instructions to use it fast.  Instructions from whom, you ask?  Why Chief Roth of course – who did turn out to be in league with the baddies after all, just a week later than I originally thought.

Roth would have made an interesting villain, given that his motivation was to foment distrust between the humans and Semaani because he fears the Semaani are engaged in a kind of slow-motion cultural invasion of Earth.  That kind of cultural xenophobia is a theme loaded with tons of potential, but it may have died with Roth – we’ll see.  As for that whole scene and how it played out, again everything just happened too fast (and was a bit too by-the-books) to have much emotional impact.  It’s going to be fascinating to see where Cop Craft goes from here, because I honestly have no idea where it’s headed either in terms of the story or the production quality.