Plot: Taruto and Pai secretly care for Kisshu. While his wound has healed up, he is still very weak and in a lot of pain.
Meanwhile, Aoyama meets with Ichigo and shares the fact that he’s having weird recurring dreams where a voice is continuously telling him to wake up. Ichigo manages to cheer him up by sharing some of her strange, goofy dreams to him.
On her day off, Pudding decides to go see one of the biggest displays of live performers in Japan, the New Year’s Street Performance Live Show. However, she’s not really there to enjoy the show – she’s hoping to steal the stage, perform her own act, be adored by audiences and adorned with a shower of money. Suddenly, strange tremors and indents in the stadium prompt her to go into the basement and transform to investigate.
She finds a large hole that leads to a massive underground cavern. Taruto arrives, surprised one of the girls has found them out already, and explains that this is a test. They plan on making a giant hole in order to cause the stadium above to collapse into the ground. If it works, they plan on making all of Tokyo sink into a similar hole.
Taruto attacks Pudding with an insectoid Chimera Animal. While she’s able to stop one with her Pudding Ring Inferno, Taruto merely calls another one. Before she’s able to stop that one with a Pudding Ring Inferno, Taruto uses his plant manipulation skills to wrap her up in roots. Just as the Chimera Animal is about to attack, a cave-in occurs. It stops the Chimera Animal, but it also buries Taruto and Pudding.
While Shirogane alerts the other girls to the Chimera Animal attack, Taruto unburies Pudding and reveals to her that she’s trapped. He can technically leave whenever he wants via teleportation, but she’s stuck. Pudding puts on a happy face and thanks him for saving her, even giving him a candy as a gift.
As the girls arrive at the stadium and combat the crazed Chimera Animal above ground, Taruto tries his best to scare Pudding by telling her she’ll either stay in this cave forever or be crushed by rubble when the Chimera Animal causes enough fissures.
Despite his efforts, Pudding is unfazed and continues to smile and laugh.
While the Mews struggle a bit with the Chimera Animal, they come out victorious. But their victory is short-lived when they’re made aware of the giant cavern underneath the dome, threatening to cause a major collapse in the stadium.
Shirogane and Akasaka decide to evacuate the people inside the dome. Since thousands of people moving within the dome at once may cause the stadium to collapse, they instruct the girls to support the building until everyone’s out.
Back with Taruto and Pudding, Taruto tries to egg Pudding on some more only to come to the realization that she’s becoming weak due to lack of oxygen. He manages to snap her out of it and demands her to tell him that she’s scared, but she claims she’s not because she has her friend, Taru-Taru beside her.
Taruto denies the implication that they’re friends, but as the dome starts to cave in around them, he finds himself struggling with the idea of leaving her there to die. He ultimately decides to save Pudding and the stadium by using his plant manipulation to create massive roots that eventually grow into trees around the dome, supporting it and preventing it from collapsing.
Taruto teleports them outside, and Pudding gleefully thanks him for saving her life and the dome. He says it was just because he wants to see her cry before she dies, but flies away smiling at the candy she gave him.
Breakdown:
– Oooh nice badass scar, Kisshu.
– Awww, Taruto bringing fruit to Kisshu as a sign of affection, and it was Pai’s idea. Awww.
– I feel like it’s been years since we’ve seen Pudding’s uninterrupted lone transformation sequence.
– Taruto and Pudding have some hilarious banter.
– My heart burst into rainbows when Pudding said it’s be nice if they turned into fossils that were smiling and holding hands together.
– Oh my god! The girls actually saved Ichigo in the nick of time for a change. I thought for sure that’d be a Blue Knight moment.
– How are the people in the dome not evacuated already? Did no one tell them of the giant monster outside? Did they not feel the several severe tremors shaking the entire stadium for the past 20 minutes?
– That cavern’s pretty big, and, since Taruto isn’t weakening, I guess he doesn’t breathe and thus isn’t taking up any of the oxygen. Pudding is a small girl and not much time has gone by, so I doubt she’d be struggling to breathe already.
– Wow, they are so lazy to reuse the same exact ‘barrier’ animation for the girls AGAIN. This is like the fourth time.
– N’awwwwwwwwwwwwww, she calls him Taru-Taru! N’awwwwwwwwww!!
– As great as it is that Taruto saved Pudding (N’awwwwwwwwwww!!) he didn’t really have to save the stadium to do it. When he teleports, it’s sometimes through a portal instead of just teleporting himself. Also, they can and do teleport other beings and objects with them sometimes. Surely, he could’ve just teleported Pudding out of the cavern.
– Oh wait, and then he just teleports her anyway!….I don’t get it. Taruto just barely had a change of heart about Pudding alone, why did he decide to save the dome too besides plot convenience?
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All in all, while this episode may be mostly filler that also doubles as a budget episode, I can’t deny that I love it. It’s fairly quick development, but it greatly humanizes (if that word’s fitting for an alien) Taruto, and Pudding is just an absolute adorable delight. Her scenes and banter with Taruto are always priceless and they’re so cute together.
In addition, the plan this week was both simple and effective. Dig a hole, destroy a city. You can’t get much simpler than that. It almost did work, too. If Taruto didn’t turn heel and save the dome, the stadium would’ve collapsed, and they would’ve gone through with the plan to collapse Tokyo, and that may have actually worked as well.
Next episode, remember Lettuce has a crush on Shirogane? Yeah, the show barely does either. But it’s an underwater episode and Lettuce turns into a mermaid again, so yay!
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The Anime Madhouse 
You forgot to mention that Masaya Aoyama went naked in this episode.
I’ve been reading all of your reviews, but I haven’t had anything to say until now. I wish there was a like button so you could know that people are paying attention to your work.
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I didn’t really feel I needed to mention that, but now that you mention it, I wonder how 4Kids would’ve handled that scene. Digitally painted boxers over him or something? Maybe removed the scene entirely?
There is a Like button 🙂 It’s at the bottom of the page, or, if you’re using the WordPress reader, it’s at the bottom righthand corner of the notification, but you need a WordPress account to do it. It’d be handy to have one available to guests, but I suppose that’s to avoid falsely flooding posts with likes. Thanks for letting me know you’re still reading. 😀
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