May I Ask for One Final Thing?

Episode 5

You have to respect Scarlet's love of the game. When confronted with the scumbag sack of crap that has exploited the kingdom, hurt her friends, and generally represented the worst aspects of human nature stuffed into one fleshy bag of meat, she doesn't just beat the stuffing out of him in the normal fashion. For such a luxurious occasion, Scarlet violates the very fabric of time and space with her magic prowess so that she can slow time down to 1/100th of its speed and brutalize the Prime Minister's bones and organs with superhuman precision and glee. Then, when the guy seemingly murders Prince Julius right in front of her, Scarlet gives the PM the ol' Team Rocket treatment, except this time the show acknowledges the catastrophic effects of such gravitational forces on the frail human body. To quote the coroner from Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday: “In my professional opinion, this guy's deader than shit.” And it's all thanks to the Mad Dog Lady

At least, I wish that were the case. I get that May I Ask for One Final Thing? is a comedy, and that Scarlet doesn't actually go out of her way to be an out-and-out murderer, but just this once I would not have minded seeing one of her victims explode like an overstuffed gore piñata. Instead, the guy gets taken out by poison at the heads of the new baddie, which is a little weak. Maybe that's just the spirit of the Halloween season getting to me, though. Either way, with at least one of the kingdom's many slimeballs taken care of, Scarlet can…well, I don't know if she can actually experience joy when she isn't laying waste to the insides and outsides of aristocratic trash, but she can at least take a breather and collect herself. After all, the discovery that Terenezza is actually a woman who was reincarnated from another world poses a challenge that might require a bit of strategizing to solve, on top of the usual application of glorious brute force. Prince Julius isn't actually dead, of course, so he also has some work to do in order to tackle this dark new threat.

Even though I wish Scarlet had been given the satisfaction of taking out the PM herself, the Terenezza twist is my favorite development of this story so far, easily. It's a wonderful spin on a quickly aging trope that also gives our heroine a proper foil who has a chance of posing a genuine threat. Sure, we've already seen that Scarlet can handily knock the girl flat on her ass on a moment's notice, but Terenezza's knowledge and cunning is the real danger here. It's a classic “Brawn vs. Brains” dichotomy, which is a great direction for the plot to take after indulging in Scarlet's ass-thrashing so directly thus far.

That said, the show's production values saw an uptick this week that is very much appreciated. We still haven't hit the heights of the first couple of episodes again, but there wasn't any point during “May I Clobber This Asshole Prince?” that the visuals actively took me out of the experience, which is basically all I can ask from an episode that isn't acting as a technical showcase. Besides, as we've learned over the last few weeks, May I Ask… is surprisingly adept at the storytelling that doesn't specifically center on clobberings, thrashings, beatings, and suchlike. On top of the story developments surrounding Terenezza and the lore of Dianism, we get more juicy interactions between Scarlet and Julius. Of course the doofus would earn Scarlet's wrath by emphasizing that he loves Scarlet as a “toy” that he barely even thinks of “as a woman,” which of course would lead us to the request that gives us the title of the episode. I just see it all as a part of the particularly silly kinks of their relationship, though. Scarlet and Julius are clearly meant for each other in some capacity. Plenty of guys will kill for the opportunity to have Scarlet cast them an acidic snarl before whipping their asses from here to next Tuesday.

Episode Rating:

May I Ask for One Final Thing? is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.