Yep.

— This is supposed to be fanservice. I don’t even know what to say.

— Orange-haired girl still hates Ange, so she pulls out a screw from her cleavage to throw at our heroine’s head. That can’t be a comfortable place to stick a jagged piece of metal. Unfortunately for her and her prank, however, an alarm goes off. The base has been infiltrated! It… it’s Ange’s maid Momoka! Only in anime would the servant class be this devoted to the people who exploit them. Ain’t no Mammy here.

— The soundtrack is so… off-putting. You know what it reminds me of? When you wander around the slums in Final Fantasy VII. Yeah, that’s exactly what it sounds like.

— Then of course, the somewhat Irish-sounding OP kicks in. Don’t hold me on that. I’m just guessing.

— Welp, it looks like Momoka is either here to stay or she has to die, because the whole war against the dragon nonsense is supposed to be top-secret. How did this shit even get started? Did governments run into the dragons one day, decide to use Normas to fight them, and also keep the whole thing classified in one fell swoop? Seriously?

— The whole exchange between Momoka and Ange is cringeworthy. Momoka doesn’t really have a personality; she’s just a carbon copy of every anime maid you’ve ever seen. She’s a concept. As such, she throws herself at her master pathetically even when Ange clearly doesn’t need or want her around anymore. This anime has a unique ability to make you feel repulsed by every single character you see.

— So has the empire fallen or what? Ange isn’t allowing Momoka to get a word in on that particular topic.

— In fact, why isn’t anyone asking the important questions? Like how the hell did Momoka even find her way here? After all, the island and everyone on it are supposed to be a secret. Did she somehow stow herself away on a ship headed for the island? How would she even manage that? Especially in that get-up?

— To top it all off, all Momoka does is continue the elitist hate-train going. Ange has finally soften up to her allies? And she no longer bitches about the living conditions at this prison? Welp, let’s bring Momoka in so that someone can at least keep whining about the food. How fresh and original.

— Needless to say, Momoka’s about as dumb as Ange was. And of course, she denies the fact that Ange is a Norma… WHICH IS WHAT ANGE HAD DONE FOR FOUR STRAIGHT EPISODES. Fuck, man. Why are we doing this again? Oh, that’s right. This is supposed to be a 2-cours show. How else would you pad this terrible excuse of a story out? By rehashing the same ol’ bullshit we’ve seen already. Motherfuckin’ RIP.

— What is there to gain from this? To see Ange’s (non-)reaction? Pfft. What a waste of time.

— Haha, so wacky.

— Oh boy, microwaved hamburgers! The future is here, boys!

— For the first time in, well, probably ever, Momoka finally gets paid as Ange throws a wad of cash her way. What did she get in return for her services in the past? Just the luxury of living in the palace? How did she ever acquire anything for her own personal good if she never had money? Or is that why she’s so obsessed with Ange? Because she never got to buy anything for herself?

— Momoka: “But this is kind of fun, too!” Yeah! It’s fun to be forced to kill dragons, and in return, you get a tiny bit of money to participate in conspicuous consumption! And you know it’s conspicuous consumption, because the mechas are supposed to be your coffins. So you want to decorate it, make it pretty, fit it with cool-looking guns or whatever! Shit, your life is forfeit anyway. You may as well get what you can out of it. It’s fun! Even someone who has never seen money before can already see how awesome and amazing it is!

— Does Momoka have a death flag? Nah. The show is hinting it too hard. When it tries this hard to foreshadow an event, you know it just wants to subvert your expectations. So you’re led to believe that Momoka will die… and then, she won’t. Just you watch. This is just another lazy, unoriginal form of storytelling.

— Momoka tries to save the old Ange by spoiling her with luxury. So where’s the maid even getting all of this stuff? I doubt Ange gave her enough money to pay for them.

— Plus, how many times do you need to repeat the same terrible joke before we move on? This is just dumb. Pointless. Neither funny nor insightful. Just one incredibly idiotic character doing incredibly stupid shit. I guess we’re supposed to see just how out-of-touch Momoka is, but Cross Ange tries to accomplish this in just about the most heavy-handed way possible. Seriously, she’s literally brain-dead. She’s even worse than how Ange used to be.

— I like how when the girls shoot those rifles, we have to get a close-up of their horribly-drawn breasts. All just so we can make the point that big boobs get in the way of aiming a gun. Cool.

— The peanut gallery badmouths Ange some more, because she’s not nice to her maid. But really, why would you want to be nice to Momoka? Momoka isn’t simply showing Ange affection. The girl is blatantly ignoring what Ange want–… ah, forget it. Every single character here is dumb, and as a result, the drama is flat and uninteresting. This is just a pointless, filler episode to pad out the length of the series.

— Dumb. In the end, Ange gives in and allows Momoka to wash her back. Basically, a stupid, unreasonable, and oblivious girl like Momoka can bulldoze her way into your heart. Don’t expect her to change and become her own character. She’s just a lowly servant, after all.

— We get some stupid flashback about how Ange had been nice to Momoka in the past. Oh, of course! This totally explains why Momoka throws herself at Ange’s feet!

— Ugh. I wonder if all the girls will end up forming a harem for Ange.

— A face full of Ange’s ass.

— Jill shows up just to tell Ange that a transport will take Momoka away. Who is she trying to fool? Even Ange knows what’s up.

— So dragons attack, but with just a couple minutes left in the episode, you literally don’t get to see anything. We cut immediately to the aftermath where the peanut gallery continues to bitch about Ange some more.

— Money is useless. Ange literally has tote bags upon tote bags of money, but no one who has any position in this society actually respects them. They’re like Disney bucks. You’re trapped in shitty, simulacrum-laden hellhole anyway. You may as well make it count by buying the tacky shit here! Of course, at Disneyland, you get to have fun by riding rides or whatnot. Here, you’re just dragon fodder.

— And isn’t this conspicuous consumption at its finest? Who else on this fucking island has a maid? Jill and Emma don’t even have maids.

— But it’s not conspicuous consumption that Ange is going for, anyway. She doesn’t actually want a maid. She saves Momoka’s life because she actually cares for the maid girl. So as Jill leaves, she says, “You can have anything with enough money. That’s how it works here.” Ange refused to spend any of her money. She is just killing dragons for the fun of it, and to the higher ups, that’s dangerous. What if Ange one day decides that she’s done? What if she doesn’t want to try hard anymore? You can’t threaten her with money, because she doesn’t want any of the frivolous shit that other people buy. As a result, if Ange ever gets tired of murdering dragons, they’d lose their best soldier, wouldn’t they! To solve this dilemma, you have to threaten Ange, i.e. if she doesn’t buy her servant’s life, the maid girl would die.

All of a sudden, that money is meaningful. Ange will have to keep earning money, because who knows when she’ll desperately need it next. There’s a reason why we see the other characters bitch and moan about Ange killing all of the dragon. Yes, she was trying to pull together enough money to buy Momoka. But at the same time, you feel as though Ange is operating with even more purpose and effort, and this is exactly what the higher-ups want. This is a harsh and cruel “society,” after all. Yeah, Momoka belongs to Ange now, but you can’t rely on that. You can’t expect anyone to honor such a contract. At the back of your mind, there has to be this fear that something like this might happen again. And Ange’s only saving grace is money. This isn’t all that different from the real world, anyway. For those of us who aren’t wealthy, we work and we work because we never know when the shit will hit the fan. But we do know this: when the shit does hit the fan — and it will — there isn’t a big enough safety net to save us from the fall. The higher-ups don’t want to provide us with that safety net. They want us to keep working.

— This is still a shitty anime, though.