Score: A-

This really is an episode where questions continue to pop up the more I think about it. I will say the episode had a strong emotional scene with Rokuro, Benio and Sae. If nothing else that scene certainly lived up to expectations. The show did a fine job getting across how utterly gut-wrenching this was for those two. At the very least they didn’t have to make a hard choice since Sae made the choice herself. Both Rokuro and Benio in this situation acted as people first and onmyouji second. They made the wrong choice as people who have decided to protect people, but they made one of the only reasonable choices they could as people who cared about someone. They couldn’t simply let Sae be absorbed into that tree and losing herself in the process. Although good thing Sae made the choice since otherwise everyone would have died.

Of course I can’t quite treat this as the end of the Dragon Spot arc. After all there seems to be a lot of threads still unresolved. Now part of that might be because these are characters that could pop up in the next arc, but I still have questions. What the heck is going to happen with Arima? We can’t exactly end this arc with that guy missing. We know he’s still in magano in whatever state he was in at the end of that fight. It seems unlikely we can just move on here without dealing with that mess first.

Also what the heck was Kuranashi even doing during this episode? He took one step against the 12 Guardians, but then did nothing else the whole time. Wasn’t this his big plan? Why didn’t he have some of the Basara he recruited get involved in this? What happened to that Basara who blames the Twin Stars for his brother’s death? If you want to keep that Dragon Spot open then just bring more Basara. A single Guardian trying to defend another wouldn’t be able to handle a Basara along with additional Kegare. This whole plan seems rather shoddily put together. Unless it was part of the plan for Sae to go back to being a branch I honestly don’t get it.

In a sense I’m curious just where things go from here. At the moment the Dragon Spots are closed and the main cast has a bit of time to process. I suppose we can look at some aftermath and then deal with the missing Arima. It would be rather weird for a character like that to go missing and pop back in randomly when they finally do begin the next arc. The one disconcerting thing going ahead is that next week…looks like a Kinako episode. Someone guard our souls. I suppose there was no getting away from going into the background of Kinako and Benio. Who knows, maybe we will get lucky and this is a sign that his character is about to get annihilated.

At least Sae made for a pretty solid and likable character. Truly the girl did come to care a lot for Rokuro and Benio. It was a nice moment for Benio that in the end Sae also acknowledged Benio as her mother. It was a painful thing for both, but credit to Benio for hanging in there. She may have gotten the most emotional when Sae returned to being a branch, but she was the first to recover from reading that book. It’s fine to grieve and feel that loss. But there isn’t any point in making Sae depressed at the prospect of those two doing nothing but crying. For now I’m still curious what is going to happen and if we’re going to the main story soon. But for the time being…let’s survive that Kinako ep.