WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. Overall, The Devil is a Part-Timer Episode 9 wasn’t my favorite episode. The humor wasn’t that stellar in it. In addition, there was a lot of unfriendliness between the characters in this episode in a way that wasn’t all that humorous and enjoyable. In particular, Satan acted really out of character when had his confrontation with and was a jerk to Rika.
Though we didn’t get much character development for the main characters, we did get some for side characters Rika and the SFC manager. We got to see Rika has a surprisingly feisty personality, which was not shown earlier. Additionally, she came across as rather bizarre. She also seems to have a crush on Alciel, which is quite interesting.
We also got to see much of the SFC manager. Looking at him, he is even more creepy than he was shown in the last episode. He was already shown as being a pervert, but he doesn’t even seem to realize just how creepy, nutsy, and perverted he is. He is openly a pervert to his own customers, which could tie into the plot by hurting SFC’s sales.
As for the plot, we got to see more of Rika and the ongoing war between MgRonald’s and SFC. Given how Rika is becoming more important now, I wonder if she’ll start to tie more into the plot going forward. If she does, then this is one of the brighter spots of the episode.
Looking at the humor, the episode in general was not as humorous as other episodes and felt disappointing. The humor relied less on the main characters than usual and more on supporting characters, most notably Rika and the SFC manager. The scene with Alciel blurting how he dislikes the disrespect for Satan at SFC was hilarious. Many of the other jokes though were just okay or even disappointing.
Given this is a comedy show, its humor is clearly important to the success of the show. So far, this show has generally been able to land the humor quite nicely, but The Devil is a Part-Timer Episode 9 was an exception. It’s also fine for comedy shows to have less humorous episodes on occasion, so long as they make up for the lack of humor with strong other elements like character development, plot, and other emotions. This episode though didn’t have any of these. Hopefully the next episode will be better.
The Devil is a Part-Timer. Funimation.com, 2013. Web.