Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - Episode 8
Slice of life before the drama happens. Tatsuya gets dragged into the big inter-school contest. Miyuki learns to fly.
Hmm.
Several things were confirmed about Tatsuya this week. It's not stated specifically, but he is Taurus Silver, the genius magic engineer. This was hinted at way back in
Episode 3. Of course, he could just be involved with a project or group code-named Taurus Silver, but with the way he was making Miyuki crack up over his speculation that the famous engineer is a teenager, well, that's pretty much all the confirmation we need.
More things that were barely shown in the prologue to the first episode showing Tatsuya as a child soldier were fleshed out here too. Such as a military officer playing a hacking game with Tatsuya just to make a phone call, addressing him as Special Officer, and asking him to calibrate a new magic gun for the armed forces. There seems to be lots of retired military working in Tatsuya's orbit, like Mibu's father doing some criminal intelligence work. Small world, indeed.
And we get an explanation of why the school nurse was so nosy about all the students: she's an undercover Public Safety officer, who just happens to train under the Shiba siblings' shinobi master. I'm reminded of what one of the girls said in the first episode, "I don't think there are any civilians at this school."
As a first episode to a new story arc, everything in it is heavy with foreshadowing. From the introduction of Erika's childhood friend, Tatsuya's scheduled visit to Taurus Silver's corporation, the completion of a practical gravity-based flying spell, and the Major's warning to Tatsuya about a criminal syndicate targeting the magic school competition, we're given our list of landmarks to guide our way through the upcoming episodes.
Geh.
We get no action BAMF this episode, but we get a lot of intellectual BAMF'ing from Tatsuya. They should call him the precedent breaker, since he proved he was more than good enough to be one of the magic engineers for the upcoming magic school competition. He rocks code old-school: keyboard, text editors, and reading memory addresses in hexadecimal. As some people said as they watched him do the CAD calibration for Kirihara, most people wouldn't be able to understand just how amazing it was that he did it in this way. Some dude had to complain without even knowing what happened, but he was just a tool to get other people to brag for Tatsuya. It's a good enough device for exposition, but if you're not already a fan of the BAMF, this kind of writing will just annoy you.
Oh, and that magical flying thing that nobody can figure out? Let him just solve it all in an afternoon... No, that's not what happened. Obviously Tatsuya had been trying to get his idea to work as an extension of his loop casting combined with a time recording function for a long time, and he finally finished the practical prototype coincidental to the conversation he had with the Student Council at lunch.
Heh.
Oh, Japan. You better get your act together, or by the end of the century, all you'll be known for is your collection of strange fetishes. Like selling used bloomers to old men...
