Well, as much as I'm predisposed to like everything about this show, I have to agree with Pandadice in that I'm starting to find the secondary characters extremely irritating. One thing I really liked about the first series was that they limited the 'silliness' to that one detective and his cosplaying sidekick. They managed to keep the rest of the show fairly serious in tone. With this season, I feel like they're just too all-over-the-place with smiling at a transvestite one minute and then having Hei hitting Suou the next.

I also cringed when they had the Sailor Moon-esque transformation scene again when Suou used her power. Unless there is something drastically different about her from other contractors, why can't they just have her eyes glow and the gun appear like they would for any other normal contractor?

I would have really liked to see more of this episode focusing on how Suou has changed since becoming a contractor, and more importantly, how much she's still the same. They touched on it briefly, but not enough for my liking, and in what seemed like a fairly contrived manner. I miss her spunky enthusiasm already. But yeah, Bill, I've been wondering too whether she's a full contractor, since they draw quite a bit of attention to that pendant her brother gave her, making me suspect that it somehow is connected to her new powers. Unlike Hei, she actually has a renumeration, but I wonder...is it possible for her to revert to being a human and give up her contract if she, say, destroyed the pendant? Or perhaps the pendant has some sort of a shielding effect. We haven't yet heard mention of a new star appearing representing Suou.

I'm also unclear on the timeframe of Suou's training. It seems like she's made an awful lot of progress in a short time, going from being a regular schoolgirl to being a fairly competent fighter.

I'm of the opinion now that nothing is going to get through to Hei until he deals with whatever it is that is killing him inside, regarding Yin. Right now he's in a place where he just doesn't care about anything else, and Suou only registers very peripherally on his list of priorities. If the first season showed us a Hei that was more human than other contractors, this season is giving us a Hei that is losing his humanity. It's almost painful to watch.