I defend this adaptation a lot, entirely because I think defending it is justified an awful lot of the time.  However, I’m not really going to defend it much here, because this episode was what it was.  I will defend Bones, who are being attacked pretty heavily, because the big narrative decisions with the series are being imposed on them and driven by a desire to promote the upcoming third film.  But the episode itself?  It was fine, but don’t sweat it if you want to skip it.

Selkie is fine for what he is, but the best part of his filler episodes is Tomokazu Seki, one of the better character actors in the business.  I do have some issues with the way the girls are treated here, but that’s nothing new.  It may not be fair to pick at BnHA for that when anime as a whole has a major problem here (as Hosoda Mamoru has been telling anyone at Cannes who’ll listen).  And there are individual moments when the girls of HeroAca get to be genuinely heroic.  But setting aside the matter of their costumes (which is near-universal to the superhero comic universe) their work study eps are certainly a marked contrast with the boys’.  Is all that beach frolic stuff strictly necessary?  We all know why it’s there and it’s not especially puerile, but it is (for me) a little demeaning.

This larger plot with trigger is one we’ve seen before, and it makes a natural for a smuggling storyline.  The dragon hero Ryukyu gets called in, which means Froppy, Ochaco, and Nejire come along too.  Once the beach volleyball and barbecue montage is over we get down to actually searching out and capturing the villains, which ends with Ochaco having to try and fly a seaplane.  There’s not a lot to this but the notion of making a plane weightless to keep it from crashing is kind of an interesting one.

However, once more we see what’s really calling the shots for this season of Boku no Hero Academia.  The trigger plot is obviously going to be an element in the movie storyline, as is the European country of Otheon that gets name-dropped after the ED (and its leader).  That’s all well and good – I get that everyone is playing for the same team here, and it’s actually refreshing to have movies incorporated into a big shounen franchise’s canon plot.  But I also feel like the TV series shouldn’t be smothered in order to facilitate that, and to an extent that’s what’s happening here.  In the final analysis this is the backbone of the franchise, and what the production committee is doing by prioritizing the movies strikes me as pretty risky.