Episode Eight opens with a recap of the very end of Episode Seven, and then takes the scene a little ways further. The opening of Episode Eight confirmed my worst suspicions: Professor Moral did indeed kill Art at the end Episode Seven. As we see a couple of times in this episode, Moral uses his ability to turn into other people to pose as Art to cover up the fact that he’s now dead.

However, most of the episode focuses on a trip that Hamatora takes to Okinawa for a case. Nice and Murasaki take on their disguises from the school bullying episode in order to accompany Theo and Rei’s class on their class trip to Okinawa to save some money on travel.

Nice and Murasaki have been summoned by a man from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in regards to the manufacture of Ideal in Okinawa. People who drink it fall unconscious and stay asleep, no matter how much people try to rouse them. He asks them to bring in the man manufacturing Ideal to him instead of to the police. It turns out the suspect is the client’s older brother.

Meanwhile, Theo finds himself being approached by boys from a high school in Okinawa, saying they don’t like people from Yokohama and that they need to leave the beach. After a bit of arguing, the leader of the Okinawa high school group challenges the Yokohama high school to compete against them in a triathlon. Theo ends up enlisting Nice’s help, and the Okinawa school recruits Birthday, Ratio, Three, and Honey.

Nice and Murasaki find the client’s brother, and he’s also had the Ideal and is now asleep. And it turns out that the plotlines of the Ideal and the triathlon come together near the end of the episode.

I was kind of mixed on this episode. I thought the plot of the Ideal was a good idea, but I thought the triathlon plot was rather dumb. I also couldn’t stand the leader of the Okinawa school. His overly large pompadour just annoyed me, as well as the way his cronies would lean backwards when they agreed with him. I think the things that annoyed me were supposed to be funny, but I just found them to be annoying and dumb as hell.

One of the great things about this episode was the fact that we got to see Murasaki admit that he used to be number one and thought he’d never lose to anyone, but after meeting Nice, he’s been on a losing streak. We see this competitiveness come out later when Murasaki ends up participating in the triathlon as a surprise contestant. It ends up coming down to Nice and Murasaki at the end, and it’s a chance for Murasaki to try to triumph over Nice.

Even though I may not have cared much for the triathlon part of Episode Eight, I can still say that I enjoyed it more than Episode Five. So Episode Five was basically Hamatora‘s hot springs episode, and I think we can basically call Episode Eight the beach episode. Hopefully this will be the last of the anime episode idea tropes for the series.

Now that there’s only a few episodes left, I wonder how long Professor Moral will be able to disguise himself as Art before he’s discovered. Also, I’m curious to see how the overarching story will end up being resolved.

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