I literally just watched these two episodes five minutes ago, and I am straining to remember what happened in them. And this two-parter is supposed to be kicking off the final stretch of episodes, right?!

It's got some exposition, but nothing really worthwhile. Gramps and Eadith are the same person, but I feel like that's the conclusion we all came to a while ago? If anything, a reveal that they were two different people would've been a bigger surprise. We see how Eadith met Takeru's dad, but it's really hard to care about that. It'd be like flashing back to when Onari first came to the temple. It's grounded in character, so it's not totally unwelcome, but how does it add to anything? Why save it 'til now, other than maybe the producers just forgot until they were writing up these scripts? The parallels between Eadith/Takeru's dad and Takeru/Adel just don't make the final sequence of the story more resonant. We don't really learn anything. Takeru's belief in people is well established by this point, and I don't really look at Adel as a redeemable character. He's a million miles from the epically conflicted character that Alain was in the first half, and not someone the audience is begging to see more of.

I find Adel incredibly dull and one-note, so that's maybe not helping this story much. It's a lot of time spent with Adel, and him trying to kill Takeru, and it's just not that engaging. The strategy of "show up, try to kill Takeru and the gang, watch them escape, wait, repeat" is boring, and Adel just doesn't have the sort of villain charisma to elevate boring material. He's not bonkers enough, pathetic enough, menacing enough, anything enough to feel like an unstoppable villain. It seems like the show is trying to get us to see him as an unhinged, deluded maniac, but he seems more or less the same pissy tyrant he was 20 episodes ago.

This story felt like a show with senioritis. It's got its eyes on the clock, it knows that in just a few more weeks it can leave all of this behind, it's just going to show up, do the bare minimum, keep its head down, not try too hard but also not really piss anyone off. Just run out the days and be gone forever.