The Devil is a Part-Timer Season 3

Episode 23

To be honest with you guys, I'm not sure what's going on anymore. It feels like as we approach closer to the end game, the show has just thrown detailed exposition out of the window in favor of just trying to move the plot along which is funny because I feel like if we didn't waste so much time in earlier episodes getting to this point, we could've had more opportunity to properly flesh out exactly what's transpiring. I have a lot of questions about what exactly is happening to everybody and I feel like the show knows this because when Maou heroically shows up at the end, he says that he'll explain everything over a nice family dinner with everybody. It is a sweet moment but it also feels like the show is just saving all of its explanations for another time. Let's hope it doesn't kick the football so far that we don't even get to that point by the time this season is over. Yes, I am cynical.

Emi and Shiro using their knowledge of the real world to outsmart the human army for the sake of buying time was clever. I didn't get a chance to mention it last week but that feels like a satisfying payoff and kind of a nice bit of dramatic irony where the real world ends up becoming used as a means of communicating between a human and a demon. Plus the “code” they're using is so bland and mundane that it fits in the larger comedic beats of the show. That was probably my favorite part of the episode even if it is a carryover from last week. The final shot also goes pretty hard with our heroes reuniting just in time for them to have to fight the guardian angels who still haven't fully made their plans apparent although now that Alas Ramus and her sister are together, I assume that it'll have something to do with that. These guys have talked in such big vagaries for the past six episodes that I genuinely will believe anything they say right now as far as what their plans are.

My problem is when it comes to the larger lore and technical explanations for why certain things are happening. I'm not 100% sure what “mistletoe” means and how it ties into the larger celestial forces at play. I assume it ties into the inspirations for Norse and Catholic mythology but I don't know enough of that to just take the name drops at face value. We never really got an explanation as to why Maou has been human since he got back home and as funny as the scooter chase was, I don't see how a delivery scooter is that much faster than a war horse or how we were able to just bypass an entire army with just those scooters and a couple of firecrackers. Again, it feels like we're just rushing towards the end right now and that so much fat has been trimmed to the point where we ended up cutting off some of the meat as well. Overall it's not a bad episode, just an incredibly underwhelming one that I don't think hit as dramatically as it was trying to.

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The Devil Is a Part-Timer!! Season 3 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Hulu