I think.

This is a legit first in 10-plus years of blogging anime.  I wrote a series review post for Tenchi Souzou Design-bu, only to have another episode come along a week later.  What do I call this one?  How do I label it?  Do I change the label or title of that post (in which I actually did review the series)?  I love having this extra ep but damn, those are annoying questions.  Still – I guess I would take that tradeoff any day of the week.

As best I can tell, this ep was an April Fool’s joke on the part of the staff (even if it did drop in April 2nd) and had always been planned to air today.  I guess I can buy that, but the odd part is that we ended up with what felt very much like a finale last week, and the actual finale has nothing “final” about it at all.  It’s as if they took Episode 7 and aired it as Episode 13, and pushed #13 up to #12.  In point of fact that makes this play very much like an OVA episode – except one that happened to air in the regular TV timeslot.  There’s something going on behind the scenes  here that we’re not being told about, but in the end I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

As for the ep itself, at this point Heaven’s Design Team pretty much always delivers as expected, and this ep was no exception.

• Working with clay is a natural image one gets when thinking about what these guys do, so I’m only surprised we didn’t get it sooner.
• Birds are hot, man.  Who knew?  Not me.
• When explained, the notion of why there are no birds that utilize live birth makes sense.  But I must confess I was fooled – I figured there was one, and (as usual with this show) I just didn’t know about it.
• The whole “gattai” project was fun.  And for once, I was sort of in the game on this one – I thought “camel” right away when I heard the order, even if I wavered a couple of times when water seemed to be involved.
• As is usual with this series, the way that whole process was pieced together was really elegant writing.  And it really brings home just how much of an oddity camels are – that, and the fact that a camel has to be super-specialized to survive in the environment they do.

And so it ends – for real this time, presumably.  All that stuff I said in the “series review” post last week?  That.