OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After a rather explosive opening ceremony, the Daihasei Festival begins in earnest, spanning the whole week and with each event involving Espers. Due to Kuroko’s injuries, Misaka and Kongou (another student at Tokiwadai) takes Kuroko’s place in a three legged race event. With her powers being air based and Misakas being lightning based, she nicknames their team the “Gods of Wind and Lightning”. Their opponents are no slouches though, with one affecting asphalt, one affecting frictional coefficients, and another controlling hamsters. Still, Misaka and Kongou make out with the win in the end. Misaka’s friends AND her mother come to congratulate her, though turn on her in gossiping about a certain “spikey haired boy” that she was dragging in the scavenger hunt event.

But trouble is brewing as members of MEMBER, the Dark Side group controlled by the governing board, sends members Xochitl, Kozaku, and Baba to interfere with the festival. First mission being making Misaka powerless in a later event. What they don’t know is that one of Misaka’s clones, 10032, has been mistaken for Misaka and is in that event.

OUR TAKE

This season is literally off to the races as the actual festival gets under way. And right off the bat I am appreciating the extra close look we’re getting at the festival’s events that seemed to get a bit overlooked in the Index version of these events. It’s often a pretty interesting opportunity when sports events in a world with normalized superpowers are introduced and this race did show quite a bit of ingenuity and creativity, especially given how little actually happened. We got to see each racing team have to think pretty quickly on possible advantages their powers would present, from asphalt manipulation to calling hamsters to do their bidding, and every possible edge that could be gained in between. So even if Misaka’s wins are pretty much a given, it’s at least cool to see a cool way of using the time.

In terms of placing this on the timeline, the mention of the scavenger event places this about after Episode 9 of Index Season 2 (the beginning of this arc from that show’s perspective) where we see Misaka pulling Touma along to win that event. Having watched this and Index’s versions of the Sisters Arc side by side, it should be neat to do the same with this and the Daihasei episodes, assuming it doesn’t get too complicated. Though speaking of complicated, do you ‘member MEMBER? In case you don’t, or didn’t see Index Season 3, MEMBER is one of the Dark Side groups that fought ITEM, GROUP, SCHOOL, and BLOCK in that horribly rushed arc. Perhaps we have a chance to get to know them better here as well, like this show did with Frenda from ITEM before she was killed.

And last but not least, we get to properly talk about this season’s first new OP and ED. The music for both feels…pretty samey for the rest of the franchise’s musical choices, being up tempo pop that blends together after enough times. The visuals, however, do provide cool hints on what will be covered for the next dozen episodes, specifically more focus on Misaki (who only got a brief hint of her true capabilities at the beginning of last season), Sogiita Gunha (who looks to be fighting with Touma, which should be a cool team up), some weird looking nurse character with a goopy…ally? True identity? And also an appearance by Kihara Gensei, member of the infamous Gensei family. This is especially important to the Railgun side of things because his granddaughter actually was the final antagonist of the first season. Plus all the other fan faves are coming back, to that’s neat. Perhaps we’ll start seeing them in action with the next episode.

Score 8/10