As you know if you listened to the Boku no Hero Retrospective episode of My Taste is Better Than Yours, I’m no longer unspoiled when it comes to this series. This is the first new ep since I finished the manga (thanks to the Olympics). So has my outlook changed? In the broader sense this is not new for me – I was ahead of the anime for its first several seasons. Of course it’s different when you know how everything’s going to turn out, and I imagine that will color my observations somewhat. But Bones has always brought their own signature to the material, and that’s certainly not going to change.

This much I know. There just aren’t many studios that can hang with Bones when they go all-out on action. I mean, like maybe one or two charitably. I imagine the rest of the series is going to pretty much be a sasuga-fest, though there’s always the possibility another film is in pre-production and that could tax the staff’s ability to keep up (it’s happened before). These are big, important moments – and if anything HeroAca has tended to be even better in anime form because it has Bones bringing them to life. I could do without the three minute recaps every week, but other than that Bones continues to do great service to a great manga.

The priority for the moment is getting Izuku to the Coffin in the Sky, where even Shigaraki seems impatient to get the main event on the road. In order to facilitate that our boy gets a lift from the “school bus” – Star and Stripe’s fighter squadron, still in Japan in defiance of orders to retreat. I don’t know how the physics work when Deku still has a human body, but he does get home a lot faster when pushing the sound barrier. Soon enough (literally) he arrives at the CitS, and thanks to Mirio’s distraction the barrier can be lowered for the two seconds it takes to get Deku into the arena.

Mirio is really the MVP here, and not for the first time. He continues to be a test of just how much is possible without the benefit of a great quirk. The fact is, whatever it is that makes a hero suited for the #1 slot, when it comes to personality Lemillion has it more than anyone else of his generation. He doesn’t have a mega-quirk like One For All or anything close, but he has All Might’s disdain for pragmatism and defeatism. He’s an idiot in the way all #1 heroes have to be, in a way Endeavor will never be. He  keeps his head when Midoriya loses his, talks him back when his anger at seeing Kacchan and the other fallen threatens to overtake (and weaken) him.

Shigaraki – or whatever he is now – has certainly been waiting for this moment. Just who rules in that freaky body now is very much in question, though Deku certainly wants to know if Shigaraki is still inside. In a sense this is two brothers – one long dead and one who should be – duking it out using youngsters as their proxies. But Yoichi didn’t ask for this fight – he’s just trying to end it. And Izuku is still very much in control of his body, even if he’s increasingly relying on the strength of his One For All predecessors.

All of them play important roles here, but 7th, Shimura, is among the most critical. She (grandma-vision?) tells Izuku that Tenko is indeed still in there, something Mirio too suggested might be the case. The other central player here is 2nd, Kudo. His “Gearshift” is the quirk that proves most integral to Deku in his battle with Shigaraki. The power to change the speed of things in defiance of the laws of physics, over generations of melding with One For All it’s developed into something so powerful even trying to use it brings great risks, and Kudo has advised its use only as a last resort. Which this certainly is.

There’s a lot going on here both on the surface and subtextually. As such, we rely heavily on two elements – the artists and animators, and the key seiyuu. And both absolutely hammer it out of the park. This episode is visually epic, glorious and darkly beautiful. And as for the cast, we get the brilliance we expect from Ootsuka Akio – no surprise there. But both Yamashita Daiki and Uchiyama Kouki, due to the nature of what’s happening inside their characters, are forced to stretch beyond what we normally hear from them. It’s a brilliant episode in every respect, a credit not just to Horikoshi Kouhei’s writing but to the talents of those bringing it to the screen.