Another chance for me to point out some inconsistencies and plot holes in this episode. Well, at least this episode wasn’t as terrifyingly bad as the previous two episodes.

First, I think they’ve been glossing this over, but I had always thought that the people in the other world don’t really speak Japanese, and that Hakkon’s assembling of Japanese words was just supposed to be translation. You know, like how in English, they pretend like he’s assembling English words, the original Japanese material is pretending like the original source is some other language and it’s been translated into and pretending to be Japanese.

But that’s thrown out the window by having them watch an actual Manzai in Japanese. There’s really no explanation for this except that they actually speak Japanese in that world. So, somehow they literally speak Japanese, but they invented their own writing system and can’t even recognize any Japanese characters. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Also, if everybody speaks Japanese, and he has access to manzai in Japanese, it seems like all of his communication problems are over. He can just use the manzai to assemble whatever he wants to say, right? But I’m guessing they’ll never bring up this manzai stuff again, except when dealing with that director.

Up until this point, only the first two stratums were shown as having anything other than the most basic amenities. Now, on the 6th or 7th stratum, there’s just this random blacksmith. It’s not too odd to imagine an eccentric and talented blacksmith going to a place that was hard to get to, but then you’d expect him to be making legendary weapons or something. You wouldn’t expect him to trade one item in his shop for food.

The teleportation circles are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes they can be activated many times in a row. Sometimes they need a magic stone. Sometimes they just need time to recharge.

Also, the teleportation circles are starting to make less and less sense, in general. How could that mage charge the circle from the other side? Aren’t teleportation circles really just one or two way? And how did he know which stratum the other people were on? These teleportation circles are so important to the current story that you can’t really just invent that they work a different way every time you talk about them.

And lastly, Kerioyl is making less and less sense. All he did was touch Hakkon, and he made this complicated teleporter interfering spell? I thought that stuff was supposed to be difficult. And he went to all of that trouble, but it just teleported them to an unexpected stratum, barely hindering them at all, possibly helping them by sending them to a deep stratum when the early-stratum teleporters are basically out-of-commission?