The Promised Neverland episode 9 delivered on that whole “being a good episode” thing that I dig so much. Thankfully it did in fact open on where the last episode ended off, and then the entire episode’s just this kinda slow Norman being all “y’all if I leave you’ll die” and then they get emotional and are like “hol’ up Norm, we got you”, and then when Norm thinks all is got, we get a perhaps not too surprising revelation about the wall that seems like it’ll impede the escape a little bit - the other side of it is, uh, a big ol’ cliff. Except here’s the thing, right? Norman chose to come back after learning there was a cliff, which is really dumb. Because Norman could have just told them that later - they establish that Emma and Ray are unlikely to be shipped off (well, Ray has to break a bone first) so the three would have plenty of time to communicate about this. Norman could be all “hey there’s a cliff here so let’s use the like month we still have to plan what we can do now that we have this information” but instead he’s like “I’ll come back right now and force us to come up with a plan in a matter of hours to prevent me from being shipped away and the only benefit of doing this is I get to tell you guys about the cliff sooner”. Like I get it, the cliff was probably a bit of an emotional ride for Norman, but I still feel like this was done to add more tension than necessary in a situation where Norman took the clearly worse path. Again though, it was still a good episode. There’s less of the boring chessmaster bullshit and more of the uh, stuff being interesting going on. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief that 11 year old Ray could assemble some sort of EMP device that he started work on when he was a fucking 5 year old, but I guess they grow up fast in this world of murdering orphans. One thing I don’t know if I’ve mentioned in any of my posts about this show is that it hasn’t shown any signs of fatigue on the part of the production team - it looks as good now as it did in episode 1. Soundtrack still slaps and we’ve even got a new ED to boot. Could be a one time thing - episode 9 seems like the popular choice for one-off EDs, but it could also be used for the remainder of the show. Granted I preferred the first ED but...

It’s been years since I’ve had a nightmare like that.