It’s a mess, but not the way the detractors and the indifferent considered it as. On the fifth episode Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt delivered something either what people expected and hoped it would but found lacking, or something they would never credit this show of pulling off.

It’s easy to be taken in by the second half of the episode, with its dark, glum, and gritty story… that’s still feel-good in the end. What makes it remarkable is the visual style… there is nothing titillating fanservicey about it. It adds more to the case that PSG is anti-titillation.

There’s a high level of sexual content, humor, etc. But nothing in the delivery conventionally makes a fan fap to it. In fact, there’s a high level of disgust-provocation. In the first half of this episode this is taken to extreme ends when there was an explicit sex-scene between Panty and a man, but the act is wholly consisting of fingering each other’s noses and transferring boogers/mucus as stand-ins for vaginal fluid and semen.

Then it’s followed by the aforementioned dark story… a salesman down on his luck, your Japanese Billy Loman but without the bombast and mostly told in the office setting. Panty and Stocking themselves appear almost cameo-like, but their appearance is meaningful and effective.

It reminds me of some Batman, Spiderman, or even Spawn stories I used to read in high school. Yeah, it reminded me of these in a very good way.