Our episode starts with a needless mini-recap of who Ataru and Lum are, and then we’re off to a sequence where Lum very carefully prepares a very special lipstick in the onboard lab of an orbiting Oni spaceship. It’s special because it enables whoever wears it to be drawn to someone else wearing it like a magnet.
Lum is sick of her Darling never being kissy-kissy with her, but underestimates his speed and agility when he doesn’t want to be kissed. My question to him is, what is so wrong with Lum that he can’t accept her as a partner? I guess it really is about the having, not the getting.
To that end, Ataru pretends to throw the lipstick out the window, but secretly takes it to school to use on the cutest honey available. It’s kind of cruel to give her something she thinks is in good faith, but Ataru pays for it since her fists and feet get to his face before her lips do. With Mendou wanting to kiss Lum and all the girls wanting to kiss him, chaos ensues.
When the class votes to do yaminabe, a kind of potluck hot pot in which you’re allowed to put anything you want in the pot, Lum again breaks out the heavy equipment to make a bizarre complextion that resembles a bit konpeitou, but when both a dog and Ataru taste it, their mouths (and other orifices) become red and inflamed.
Turns out Lum, and likely all Oni, prefer incredibly spicy food (she guzzles habanero sauce with glee). One wonders, then, why she’d hate garlic of all things. I guess it’s less the heat and more the unique odor. Ataru stuffs himself with garlic, but by the time he gets to his room where Lum is, she has an air freshener spray at the ready to counteract his funk.
Lum really gets into the spirit of yaminabe by putting all the things she likes in the pot, including one of her special spicy candies. This renders most of the pot inedible to all, and only she, Atari, and Shinobu are still upright by the end of the first few minutes.
In a game where you have to eat what you take out of the pot with your chopsticks, Shinobu gets fish bones, Lum gets a wooden sandal, and Ataru actually gets the “chomchomp”, a vegetable Ten specifically got for him from a passing interplanetary grocery vender. True to its name, the chomchomp ends up trying to eat Ataru.
It’s a week with another pair of fairly diverting skits, but far from any serialized character development, if anything Ataru and Lum have gone backwards; at best, they’re standing still as a couple.
I know, I know; this resolutely isn’t the kind of show that cares about character development, in fact, its characters are meant to be awful jerks who never learn. But that makes the times it looks like Lum and Ataru have turned a corner sting all the more when they essentially reset in the next skit or episode.
RABUJOI - An Anime Blog 