Sakura is stoked to spend the day with Tomoyo, only to be reminded by Toya that it’s her day to do the chores around the house. While cleaning, she discovers the Wood card hidden under the card, and runs to tell Kero about it, but can’t find him due to him accidentally closing himself in the washer.

Then, while vacuuming in the basement, she finds another card, though she can’t tell which one because the front of it is covered in ink. She then sets the two cards next to each other in the basement.

After running an errand, Sakura comes home only to hear odd noises coming from the basement. When she opens the door, branches of a tree suddenly shoot out. They close the door, clipping a piece off, but it disappears, confirming it’s from a clow card, though Kero doesn’t know why Wood is going berserk, as it’s normally a very calm card.

The tree then grows more, ensnaring Sakura and Kero just as someone is ringing the doorbell, but it ends up being Tomoyo who has brought lunch over. She frees Sakura, who then tries to turn Wood back into a card, but it only retreats back to the basement, only to grow back even faster than before, forcing the trio to the top of the house.

To keep Wood from destroying the house, the trio make their way back down to the basement, where they find it flooded, thanks to the other card Sakura found – the Rain card – which mixed with Wood, has caused the big mess. Rain chases Sakura around, well, raining on her until Kero tells her to use the Watery card to capture it since Rain is under Watery. Watery is easily able to contain Rain, allowing Sakura to seal it. Wood then quietly returns to a card on it’s own. However, the adventure has caused the house to turn into a mess that Sakura and Kero must once again clean up…

This episode establishes two things. The first isn’t necessarily that important in the grand scheme of things but is noteworthy: that to control the Clow Cards, Sakura must write her name on them.

The second thing, which I don’t think I mentioned in the review because it wasn’t really important to the events of the episode, but will become important in due time is the fact that Yukito eats, and eats a lot, which we saw while Sakura was out on her errand.

We continue to see that different cards have different personalities as well. We already saw that Shadow was a troublemaker, and clearly Rain is too. Wood, meanwhile, is very gentle, probably even more so than Windy.

Ein finally wakes up in the car, but demands that Reiji let her out so that she may rejoin Scythe Master. Reiji tries to tell her that Scythe Master betrayed Inferno and abandoned her, but she still insists. However, Reiji is finally able to make Ein relent by telling her that Inferno will be careful when going after Scythe Master since he has the “fear of Phantom” and Ein could easily be caught before even reaching him anyway.

Ein then asks Reiji to tell her about his memories of Japan, and afterward tells him that he should go back, since he at least has a place to go back to and his passport which proves that he is who he is. However, Reiji rips his passport up just to show Ein that he’s still who he is even without it.

That night, they stay over at a hotel, and after Reiji comes back from a convenience store, he finds Ein pointing a gun at her own head. However, she can’t fire and Reiji takes the gun from her. She then tells him that she has nothing to live for, since before all she lived for was following Scythe Master’s orders. But Reiji tells her that they did what they did to live, not die, and decides to give Ein a new name: Eren.

The next day, Reiji decides it’s time to find some cash and a new car. However, Eren notices someone watching her and runs off into an alley, where she shoots the man and meets back up with Scythe Master. Meanwhile, Lizzie and Claudia catch Reiji as he’s trying to hot wire a care. Lizzie interrogates Reiji, but naturally he isn’t able to tell them anything about Scythe Master. Then Claudia tells him that the only way to prove his innocence and save Ein now is to kill Scythe Master.

And the plot gets deeper. I didn’t necessarily expect Scythe Master to show up so soon again, but that definitely throws a wrench into Reiji’s plans (as does him getting caught, obviously). However, that probably means Scythe Master is going to bite the dust sooner rather than later too.  One also has to wonder how Reiji will get out of being caught too.  Obviously he’s going on a mission to kill Scythe Master, but will they keep an eye on him to make sure he returns?  I’m sure that if he runs away again they’ll just chase after him again.  Eventually he’s going to have to beat Lizzie I think.

My guess is that Ein is going to become loyal to Scythe Master again since that’s what she was looking for anyway to give herself purpose, so with Reiji being tasked to kill Scythe Master, that sets us up for a real Ein vs. Reiji match up. However, as Reiji has already shown himself to be Ein’s equal even when she’s healthy, he may very well have the upper hand in skill against Ein. However, he may be more hesitant to harm Ein than Ein would be to harm him.

I also wonder if we’ll learn the real truth behind what’s going on in the next episode too. I’m about 95% sure this whole thing was a set up by Claudia, and that she’ll eventually double-cross the gang that she’s currently working with to accomplish her plot, but we may hear from Scythe Master directly what’s going on.

However, both of these topics largely deal with the same issues:  what to do material which a vast majority of people may and probably do find patently offensive, yet which do not physically harm anyone in their production, sale, or usage?

Those on the side for banning such things basically argue that the mere existence of these materials are harmful to society – that “rape games” create a social acceptability to abuse women, and that child sex depicted in manga create a social acceptability to abuse children or view them in an overtly sexual manner.  Those on the side of not banning these things are essentially arguing that, since no harm was done to anyone in the production of the work, that banning such works amount to “thoughtcrime” and censorship that is worse than the work that is being banned.  Personally, while I empathize with those who make the former claim, I’m pretty firmly in the camp that it’s hard to make something illegal if no harm is done to anyone while producing it.

On the issue that is more well known at least within the US – the comic collector’s case – anime and manga fans have the problem of misunderstanding exactly what the medium is as well as perhaps those who are, shall I say, highly emotional about the topic.  The first problem has to deal with the age old problem that, to many people, “anime,” “manga,” and “hentai” are all the same thing or interchangable terms when clearly they address different things, as obviously not all anime and manga (indeed, the great bulk of it I would imagine) isn’t hentai.  Yet, that’s perhaps the most well known type, so that’s just what people associate with it.

The second conflation that I’ve seen which complicates debate on these issues is the difference between arguing whether something should or shouldn’t be illegal vs. whether something is or isn’t ethically or morally OK.  I’ve found that those who argue that it should be illegal often conflate the position of “it shouldn’t be illegal” with the position of “I have no personal ethical or moral problem with it.”

All of this leads me to the title of this post which is, of course, a comment people seem to make whenever something like this comes up, which just makes people misunderstand anime and manga even more, and thus makes it more difficult for it to reach mainstream acceptance.  I suppose the easy path would be to, as a community, just say “we’re not gonna put up with this stuff,” but that ignores the more complex issues at hand in these cases.

Sakura takes a class trip to the aquarium, which includes them viewing the penguin exhibit. However, a weird whirlpool suddenly occurs in the middle of the pool, trapping one of the workers and a penguin, forcing Toya, who is working there part time, to jump into the water to free them.

Kero thinks that it is the working of the Watery card, one of the four elemental, and most powerful, of the Clow Cards. The problem is that Watery is too powerful for the three cards she’s captured so far – even the Windy card, the first elemental card, which Sakura kept when she opened the Clow book.

On the way home from school the next day, Sakura loses control while rollerblading because she’s thinking about the Watery Card, and nearly runs into Yukito, who asks Sakura if she wants to go out somewhere with him, which she happily accepts.

On their date, Yukito takes Sakura to…the aquarium. While there, the mysterious whirlpool shows up again in a giant water tank that extends up through a diner they’re eating in, almost drowning everyone until Yukito is able to break a door, allowing the water to drain. During the aftermath, Yukito mentions something about not being able to get snow cones while there, which gives Sakura an idea.

That night, Tomoyo, Sakura, and Kero sneak into the aquarium, where Sakura lures Watery out of the water tank and has it chase her through the building until she lures it into the freezer, which Tomoyo had been tasked to find. There she uses windy to freeze Watery, allowing Sakura to easily return it to a card.

This episode helped show that capturing Clow Cards doesn’t necessarily half to be about, or even sometimes can’t be about, overpowering it with a stronger Clow Card, like we’ve seen in the two previous episodes. In this case, Sakura had to take advantage of the Card’s weak point – in this case the fact that Watery freezes – in order to capture it.

Of course, this gives Sakura a pretty potent arsenal to capture all the rest of the clow cards from now on, having two of the four elemental cards in her deck.