Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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There is a plethora of reasons I can imagine someone wanting to drop, or simply never pick up in the first place, My Dress-Up Darling. It’s a romcom, and those are not for everyone to begin with. It’s a straight romcom, so the rabidly queer segment of my readerbase (hi friends) may be inclined to dismiss it out of hand. More specifically, the show’s tonal coherence has been a victim of poorly-worked fanservice–enough so that I’ve made a running gag out of it in these columns–and occasional tasteless humor. Any and all of this, take your pick, I absolutely get why MDUD does not have universal appeal.

But in spite of everything I’ve said about it over the past few weeks, I continue to watch it. Partly out of obligation, yes, but also partly because I do genuinely believe it has some good ideas. When the show gets out of its own way enough for everything to truly click into place, it can pull off some spectacular stuff. Episode 8 is that spectacular stuff. It is the best-yet episode of the series by a country mile, and while it doesn’t wave away my previous criticisms of the series (it may make them all the more frustrating, really), it does point toward a path forward for this show. Romcom Hell is escapable, and My Dress-Up Darling might just find an exit yet.

Up to this point, the show’s highlights have revolved around our leads, Gojo and Marin, and they get a good turn here, too. But a good chunk of this week’s episode, “Backlighting is the Best”, is instead about Juju, a character I’d previously basically written off as a one-note joke.

Let it never be said that I am right about everything I assume about a series.

Allow me to go on a tangent for a moment, it’s the proud tradition of the editor-less internet critic.

When I was very young, there were a few shows on Cartoon Network’s nascent Toonami block I really loved. Most of them were standard fare for a young boy growing up in that period of time, and as a small AMAB child, I believed I was a young boy. So naturally, most of the cartoons I gravitated toward were “for boys.” In as much as any cartoon truly is for only one gender.

There was one exception. You’ve probably heard of it, if I had to guess.

Sailor Moon was far and away Toonami’s most successful “girl show.” They only tried their hands at a few others (one was Hamtaro, which I was also fond of), and this aspect of the block has largely been scrubbed from the current incarnation’s image. (Retroactively, its inclusion has been recontextualized as fitting the block’s “action cartoons” mission statement. Which, to be fair, it certainly did.) I haven’t seen much Sailor Moon properly–I was quite young during all this, and my memories of the show are largely a hazy jumble of disconnected images–but something about seeing this pretty soldier stomp monster ass every week while also finding the time to deal with normal teenage girl issues struck a chord with me. I liked a lot of anime characters at the time. But I never wanted to be most of them. I did want to be one of the Sailor Scouts. That’s an important distinction.

So, what do 20-year-old Gender Feelings have to do with a random mid-season episode of a romcom anime about cosplay? Well, I can’t claim the feelings are exactly the same, but Juju certainly seems to be able to relate. About halfway through the episode, Juju–nervous because they’re doing a photo shoot in an abandoned building(!)–confides in Gojo why it is that she got into cosplay in the first place. He wants to know why Juju wanted him to make her outfit, instead of any of the number of other people she could’ve contacted, and this dovetails into Juju explaining why she cares about the craft in general. I’ll just say, I found the sentiment familiar.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Juju doesn’t specifically say she had an at least somewhat unhappy home life, but the very fact that she felt compelled to seek refuge in these stories does sort of imply it. She also distills the appeal of the entire magical warrior-style mahou shoujo down to a couple sentences. It’s clear that she (and by extension, the author) have a sincere and deep love for the genre. But of course, things aren’t as simple in real life as in fiction.

Magical girls (tragically) do not exist, and Juju’s realization of that fact at a young age is what drove her to become a cosplayer in the first place. Not “the next best thing,” but the sort of sublime momentary transcendence of our everyday reality that all great art–of which cosplay, and indeed fashion in general, is certainly a part–is capable of inspiring.

Even Juju’s previous nasty attitude toward Marin is explained here. She was jealous. A jealousy that can only come from caring about something very deeply. She saw an absolutely perfect outfit and had to get in on whoever was making it. It makes total sense.

Gojo is of course deeply touched by this. Why wouldn’t he be? Someone basically just poured her heart out for him to compliment his design skills. He’s so grateful that he unthinkingly seizes her hand while muttering a thank you.

^{Well, a “fank you.”}

My Dress-Up Darling then almost immediately resumes being My Dress-Up Darling. (Read: Juju, who goes to an all-girls school, faints from surprise, because she’s never held a guy’s hand before. Sure.) The moment is over as quickly as it began, though the somewhat doofy gag is not nearly enough to actually undercut it. The rest of the episode is actually also pretty excellent, but completely unrelated to any of this.

Instead, the rest of the photoshoot left implied, we cut to the last day of exams in Gojo and Marin’s classroom. On the spur of the moment, Marin invites Gojo to the beach, and it’s there that we spend “Backlighting is the Best”‘s final ten or so minutes.

The impromptu beach date here is just adorable. It’s naturalistic in a sincere, warm way that the show’s best moments have previously touched on but only delivered intermittently. I’ve never had trouble “buying” Marin and Gojo as a couple; they’re clearly into each other in a way that most stock romcom leads could only dream of, but if anyone has, this sequence should put all of that to rest. Gojo stoically takes in the beauty of the seaside. And the visuals do a lot to sell that nautical beauty; this entire segment has a wonderful in-direct-sunlight look. A sort of deliberate overexposure applied to the drawings themselves.

Marin, emboldened by their comparative isolation at the relatively deserted beach, asks Gojo if he’d like to spend the summer together after learning that he didn’t get out much as a kid. Gojo enthusiastically agrees, and in what is easily her cutest moment in the show so far, Marin has to quickly scuttle back to their beach blanket to hide her blushing. (She’s also developed a pretty fantastic character tic of cupping her face in a W-shape when embarrassed. It’s immensely endearing.)

There’s also a pretty incredible sequence where Marin buys a hamburger and has it stolen by a bird, proving that My Dress-Up Darling can, in fact, be genuinely really funny when it wants to be.

I would honestly not be surprised if this ends up being the show’s overall best episode. Its two halves are great in totally different ways, the directing is on-point throughout (there is a lot of creative storyboarding here, and in a general sense the episode is visually fantastic), and most importantly, it has heart. There’s actually enough good here that I didn’t even find proper space to mention some of it, such as Marin’s truly powerful Girl Dad Fashion, or the episode’s entire first third, which is mostly enjoyably nerdy talk about cameras.

This is the sort of episode that sticks with you, and I sincerely hope it points toward the direction the series intends to take as it enters its final stretch. But even if MDUD never returns to these heights again, watching the whole thing will have been made worth it by these twenty-three minutes alone. That’s worth something, and everyone who worked on this episode should be very proud.

Until next time, anime fans.

Egregious Horny Score: I’m pleased to report that we’re at a tasteful 1/5 this week. There’s a panty shot (which Gojo gets comically flustered by) as Marin frolics in the water, but aside from that single instance there isn’t anything in the episode that’s so much as mildly suggestive.

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