The latest episode of Sailor Moon Crystal aired on Japanese TV on Monday May 9th and is now available to stream on Crunchyroll, Neon Alley and Hulu. This week Sailor Pluto returns as Setsuna Meioh while Makoto faces off against an evil plant lady! Overall I thought this was a really great episode with fantastic animation, though I found some of the subtitles a bit distracting. There seemed to be some fairly basic grammatical errors or just sentences that weren’t written like people really talk.

The big thing this week of course is the return of Sailor Pluto. Throughout most of the episode Setsuna Meioh, Sailor Pluto’s civilian identity, doesn’t have any memory of being a Sailor Guardian. What exactly is going on here? The Sailor Pluto we saw in the future did not come from the present. While the Space-Time Corridor can be considered to exist outside of time in some sense, I always assumed that Sailor Pluto guarded it throughout time. So there should be a Sailor Pluto in the past, present and future, living through time. Which Sailor Pluto is this? We will get a bit of an explanation next week which really only raises more questions. I have a lot of thoughts on this but I will get into them in my Act 32 review.

Reika and Motoki show up again, as they’re going to school with Setsuna. The two are bickering and fighting a bit as Motoki has mentioned Makoto, one of the many young girls that comes into his arcade, and Reika doesn’t really appreciate this. Imagine how she’d feel if she watched the live action series! While on the train Motoki suggests going to have dinner near the Mugen Academy. Reika doesn’t want to because of the ominous clouds! Oddly when we see the buildings in the distance there does not appear to be any more clouds there than over the train the two are on, where it’s also raining. What?

Back at Chibiusa’s school we make an important discovery. Chibiusa and her friends have a hot teacher! Where did she come from? She looks nothing like this in the manga. In the anime we see their teacher in the Sailor Moon SuperS season, but this does not appear to be that same character. That character was struggling with aging while being single and Kyuusuke teased her for not being able to get a man. This teacher shouldn’t have any such problems! Meanwhile Kyuusuke is not subtle about his attraction to Chibiusa. As the class is encouraged to give the items they made to someone special, Kyuusuke choses to give his Sailor Moon pencil holder to Chibiusa. She misses the point obviously. Shouldn’t she be totally into this guy because he looks just like her father?

Speaking of guys who look like fathers, who’s this guy who’s hitting on Makoto in the botanical gardens? He kind of looks like Brock from Pokémon. You know who else looks like Brock from Pokémon? Makoto’s Dad! If Chibiusa is any indication girls really dig guys who look just like their Dad so Makoto should be all over this dude! Instead she daydreams about her Sempai, who we learn is named Nichogi. This episode, and the manga equivalent, are the only time we hear his name which was never mentioned in the original Sailor Moon anime. He doesn’t look like Brock from Pokémon which just doesn’t make sense if Chibiusa, Freud and Jung are to be trusted and all things considered I don’t think they should be.

This week’s villain is Tellu of the Witches 5 who is posing as Ruru Teruno. She’s in charge of phys ed and the botanical gardens. What an odd combination of interests that also overlap with Makoto’s very specific mix of girly and tom boy tendencies. Her power level is 404, double that of last week’s villain, but because this manga is from the mid 90s it’s unlike it’s a reference to http code 404, page not found. Tellu has created the Tellun flower which is this evil flower which drains people’s energy, a plot not unlike that of the Sailor Moon R movie. The Tellun plant in bloom blankets the floor with pink flowers which looks a lot like the asteroid which was blanketed in Kissenian flowers in the film.

Lots of Hotaru going on this week as we see that girls are terrible to each other sometimes. The other students at her school comment about how weak she seems and that she wears long sleeves even in summer. A change that we saw last week was that Mugen Academy students were starting to wear different uniforms with short puffy sleeves over the longer sleeve versions we’d seen earlier, and that Hotaru continues to wear. Next week we will see just why it is that Hotaru wears long sleeves and stockings. She’s not just hiding scars but also something kind of evil as she gets upset at her classmates and crushes a metal pencil box in a frightening display.

Usagi starts to suspect Hotaru, as she’s the daughter of Professor Tomoe, and so she comes along with Chibiusa to visit her. If only Chibiusa had been honest and shared Hotaru’s secret that her father makes monsters we would be able to avoid a lot of this stuff but whatever. Usagi snoops around Hotaru’s house while Chibiusa helps her friend get her Silver Crystal fix at which point she once again shows signs of being some sort of evil being stuck inside the body of an innocent looking young girl.

Sailor Chibi Moon steps it up this week by finally getting her Moon Rod. She pleads to her mother to get a weapon and then Luna P turns into this item. I’m not sure her mother did this because I thought Luna P was more related to Sailor Pluto. So she uses this device to do her ridiculously sweet Pink Sugar Heart Attack move which is animated nearly identically to how it was in the manga.

Finally Sailor Pluto shows up with her Dead Screen attack killing Tellu, who somehow turned into a big monster, and saving the day. Unfortunately this appearance is not preceded by a transformation sequence. Based on what happens in the manga it is entirely possible that we won’t be seeing Sailor Pluto or Saturn transforming in this particular story arc, though we can hope that a minor change will allow them to transform on screen.

Next week Act 32, Infinity 6 – Three Soldiers. will give a bit of an explanation as to where and when Sailor Pluto came from. We’ll get some back story on the new Sailor Guardians and face off against the final members of the Witches 5.

Keep reading for more screenshots from this episode and the next episode preview for Act 32.

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