Here we go again.

Surprisingly, this episode was actually pretty watchable. It’s still not quite where it should be, but I have to admit I nearly enjoyed it.

IMDB seems to agree with you, TimelessBear. It's a 6.0 episode. Still lower than the worst episode in S2, but a whole 2 points higher than any other episode this season, so that's something.

'thank you for not breaking my nose today' - battered boywifes of l'Anime

Hey, I’m not singing any praises for it. The season is still absolute garbage. Unless the next few episodes are insanely good - like way beyond Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 levels - there’s no saving it. Heck, I'll tell you what. If it even comes close to JK s02 I will give it a 10/10 just out of pure respect for their tactic of saving all the money for the last few episodes, it takes some balls. But we all know that's never going to happen.

What little animation they actually had was ruined with overzealous ghosting and dimming, so bad.

I'm really not that mad @ this season because I'm just not that invested, mostly I just feel bad for the poor fuck staff who got this as a career moment. 'what's our animation budget?' 'uhhh draw anything except the four keyframes we gave you for the season and you will be forced to commit seppuku by the production committee'.

I legitimately don't understand why people are so upset about the animation thus far. Is OPM a lot of people's actual favorite anime??? Why are people mad af that a 3rd season of an anime is animated shoddily, it's not like it's the first time this has ever happened. Also, with the way I saw the general population talk about the shitty animation from prior episodes only for them to turn and say the animators finally locked in for this episode, I thought god himself descended and offered at least some notable keyframes or something. At best it has a few sub two-second sequences of some semblance of fight choreography/movement, perhaps some atypical camera perspectives, and maybe they added one more in-between frame per movement than usual. Still it's literally mostly whoosh lines (but with colors!), static/tweened backgrounds in the cave and background that turns into that shitty "speed lines on top of a shitty gradient" during the moving camera sequences, blurred ass textures as floors, obscuring movement (or lack thereof) using low-effort smoke effects, 3D generated backgrounds (even when the background is literally just the clean and flat walls of the square corridor), etc. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this was still a bad episode and as a connoisseur of trash-tier anime I don't need much production value to find enjoyment watching anime, it's just so surprising how seemingly impossibly high some people's standards were, only for THIS level of animation to somehow meet it. All this to say, mfs should just be like me and have 0 standards.