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InuYasha - The Final Act - 05

Summary:

While Kohaku joins up with Kikyou, Kouga decides to leave his lackeys behind from now on because of the danger. Sesshoumaru meanwhile watches as Mouryoumaru tricks two demons and absorbs them both, and afterward, he challenges Mouryoumaru to a fight with his own new ability. Mouryoumaru, however, gets away and Sesshoumaru isn’t able to chase him because Byakuya distracts him. At around this same time, InuYasha has to deal with the fact that he can’t handle Tessaiga’s new ability, so he has Toutousai take a look at it, and Toutousai sends InuYasha to train with his acquaintance Yourei Taisei. When they reach the Yourei Taisei’s place, they find that the old man has gotten his innards taken by a demon, and it thus becomes InuYasha’s job to recover them. To make things harder, Yourei Taisei puts a seal on Tessaiga to prevent InuYasha from using it against just any demon. The group ends up at a private residence where they encounter a serpent demon, and although he still can’t use Tessaiga, he is able to use his own claws.

After Yourei Taisei advises InuYasha to look for the demon vortex, InuYasha is able to see swirls of demonic energy. He’s eventually able to find the right one and slashes it to destroy the serpent demon. However, this turns out to not have been the demon that took Yourei Taisei’s innards, and when the group returns to Yourei Taisei’s dwelling, they find an ox demon there. InuYasha is finally able to use Tessaiga again, but he still has to find the right demon vortex, and even worse, cutting the ox demon cracks Tessaiga. InuYasha, however, figures out that the real demon vortex is centered around Yourei Taisei’s body, and one swing ends the battle. In the aftermath, Yourei Taisei reveals that all this had been part of his plan to retrain InuYasha to be able to detect the true demonic energy and so that InuYasha would remember that Tessaiga is a sword for cutting. Tessaiga is also now bathed in a great amount of demonic energy because InuYasha had cut Yourei Taisei’s demon vortex, but what Yourei Taisei doesn’t tell InuYasha is that Tessaiga has one more form to discover.


Impressions:

The Sesshoumaru and Mouryoumaru parts of this episode turned out to be pretty good even though I was a little disappointed that Mouryoumaru ended up running away again. I really just want to see Sesshoumaru kick some ass now in a fight that matters. In any case, despite liking that first part, I didn’t really like the rest of the episode. I’m not sure if it was the pacing this time or what, but the whole run-around to train InuYasha seemed unnecessary. I think part of the problem is that these swirls of demonic energy are made out to be rather important, yet they didn’t develop the concept enough, and having those swirling neon targets just floating around in the air looked sort of silly. I assume though that since they spent most of an episode on it, InuYasha will make use of this new ability pretty soon. And on that note, the title for next episode appears to spoil the fact that Mouryoumaru will meet his end in next week’s episode. So much for him being a good antagonist…

Reviewed by OMNI