Tenchi Muyo! Tenchi Universe Episode 8: No Need for a Genius!

We return once again to the world of Tenchi Muyo. This time around we open with a flashback to Washu getting exiled to planet Earth. When Washu asks why she deserves such treatment as her only crimes were building a multitude of super-weapons capable of destruction on a galactic scale. Yes, why indeed.

However, Washu’s reminiscing is cut short and we learn that the creepy puppets who hang around on her shoulders and sing her praises also serve as her alarm clock. Washu wakes up with a creepy smile as it shall soon become apparent that her latest invention is her most sinister one yet, and given that the last one was a literal hell mouth inside a carnival funhouse, that’s saying something.

Elsewhere in the Masaki house, Ayeka and Ryoko seem to have done the impossible and found common ground in the form of their mutual love of soap operas. Mihoshi then does the dumbest thing she has done in the entirety of the eight episodes of the show we’ve covered so far and changes the channel. If it’s not clear by now, Mihoshi is a moron and this scene demonstrates why. This television show seems to be the only thing preventing Ayeka and Ryoko from engaging in a cataclysmic battle to the death that is likely to destroy the entire planet in the process, and Mihoshi just changed the channel because her favorite Sentai knockoff show happens to be on.

In the kitchen, Sasami is concerned that Washu missed lunch, which as we know is a sacred ritual here at casa de Masaki, so Tenchi decides to go check on her to see what’s up. When Tenchi asks Washu in her lab why she missed lunch, she seems alarmingly excited about to answer that question. As we soon see, Washu has built a robot duplicate of herself to serve as her lab assistant. Clearly Washu has never seen Age of Ultron otherwise she’d know that building robot lab assistants seldom works out. As they venture deeper into Washu’s laboratory, followed by Mihoshi who followed them in like a stray cat, Washu explains that she plans to use one of her inventions to transfer her personality into the robot, which she has named Mecha-Washu. In simple terms, this means there will be two Washu’s running around. If this experiment is a success, the universe is doomed. However, when Washu enters the pod to begin the personality transfer, something goes screwy and Mihoshi tries to fix the problem by pressing random buttons. Washu’s insane inventions combined with Mihoshi’s insane level of idiocy could potential blow a hole in the very fabric of reality, but fortunately, this time is only blows up the pods. Much to Washu’s relief, Mecha Washu is completely undamaged, but something went wrong with the transfer as the robot seems to have gotten Mihoshi’s personality instead, a stray hair from Mihoshi somehow having gotten into the pod beforehand. So, what we have here is an incredibly powerful terminator with the mind of a hyper active woman-child with the intelligence quotient of a piece of asparagus. Somehow this is much worse than all the doomsday weapons Washu built that lead to her exile.

Thinking that it is Mihoshi, the robot naturally wants to fight crime and storms out of the lab. This leads to a humorous moment in which Ayeka and Ryoko are confused by the sight of the robot followed immediately by the real Washu but are too engrossed in their soap opera to care. Again, because Mecha Washu thinks it’s a cop, she sees Washu and the others trying to stop them as an obstruction of Justice and therefore criminals and tries to take them down with her rocket fists, thus beginning a huge epic battle… that Ryoko and Ayeka are too engrossed in their soap opera to notice. Washu pulls out another one of her sinister inventions, a volleyball that is also an extremely powerful explosive device. Ryoko and Ayeka come out to observe this volleyball match to the death but only because this battle is so loud, they can’t hear the TV. In a very amusing moment, Ryoko pushes Ayeka directly in the path of the volleyball’s trajectory. See this is what happens when they don’t have soap operas to watch. However, after giving him a reprieve for the last few episodes the volleyball match ends when the universe suddenly remembers that it hates Tenchi and wants him to suffer and the volley-bomb destroys his vegetable garden. Fed up, Washu activates the Robot’s self-destruct sequence. That probably should have been her first move, but she did work very hard on building this killer woman-child, so she only wanted to use the self-destruct if she needed to. Unfortunately, Mecha-Washu has the ability to summon the spare body that Washu built for her, a body not equipped with a self-destruct mechanism. After reattaching it’s head in a scene reminiscent of The Exorcist, the whole thing starts over again. Fortunately Kiyone comes to the rescue. While at first the thought of a killer robot with the mind of Mihoshi sounds like one of her nightmares made manifest, but since she knows Mihoshi better than most, she knows exactly how to manipulate Mecha-Washu by reminding her it’s almost time for Mihoshi’s favorite TV show. While Mecha-Washu and Mihoshi are busy watching TV, Kiyone hits the Robot’s off switch and the day is saved. And So our episode ends with Washu unveiling a new robot duplicate, this time with the mind of Ryo-Ohki.

This was another filler episode, but a fun one with some amusing action. It’s funny to see the ordinarily calm and confident Washu get frustrated for once. While the antics of Washu and the others trying to take down her rogue creation are hilarious, the real stars of the episode are Ayeka and Ryoko, who some how manage to be more entertaining sitting around watching TV than they usually are when trying to kill each other.