Princess Principal Episode 8: The Truth of the Black Lizard Planet

Review (with potential spoiler):

This episode is excellent in that it finally clears up a lot of the viewer’s suspicions about what happened between Ange and Charlotte once upon a time and it does it well. It is an expected reveal but one that is dealt with appropriately. What it isn’t particularly good at is being an episode on its own.

The story essentially has the group staking out a building and other than interactions between Ange and a pickpocket where she begins to tell a story from the Black Lizard Planet (giving us a flashback of overly adorable Ange and Charlotte) and a few montages, very little happens. This is an important character episode but the plot of the episode is really flat.

While the occasional character driven episode in a larger narrative works, Princess Principal has been completely episodic up until this point (and out of chronological order) so giving us an episode that doesn’t stand up in its own right but as part of the larger picture might work, is a bit of a risky move. Fortunately, the characters here are charming enough to pull it off so even if you walk away realising that pretty much nothing happened, you still feel pretty satisfied.

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Thanks,

Karandi James.