Last time on Soul Eater Z! Er, when we last saw our heroes in the DWMA, they were in a bit of a fix. Kishin Asura, previously sealed away beneath the school in a stylish sack fashioned from his own skin, escaped as a result of a successful plot on the part of evil witch Medusa. Asura's madness spread across the world, and from the looks of things? Game over.

What darkly toned anime series would be satisfied merely tossing one seemingly unbeatable villain against its hapless super powered kids and leaving it at that? Certainly not Soul Eater. This third set of episodes largely shifts its focus from the brain-twisting Asura to the awakening of the latest villainess to threaten the DWMA death kids - Medusa's older sister Arachne, who slumbered for 800 years waiting for revenge and kept herself busy watching time go by through an army of spiders.

Gone are the episodes where the reaper kids take down weekly monsters to gather souls. Snape killed Dumbledore, kids. Party's over. Helming her own criminal syndicate, the aptly named Arachnophobia, Arachne and her minions begin a campaign against the DWMA as the two factions compete over collections of Magic Tools crafted by the mysterious wizard Eibon. Mifune makes a reappearance and shakes Black*Star's resolve, Medusa is reborn in the body of an innocent young girl and begins manipulating Crona and Stein's madness, and a mediocre meister temporarily conquers the DWMA by partnering with the obnoxious Excalibur — but only for a little while.

The stand-out episodes of the set center on an all-out war between the DWMA and Arachnophobia on Lost Island over the Brew, Eibon's greatest artifact. Between a showcase of new combined special attacks, a discordant piano performance, and the greatest nose-based antagonist the anime world has presented in some time, Soul Eater brings a good mix of action and narrative writing to the table in a more polished, cohesive manner than most shounen action series. By now, Soul Eater has successfully made its transition to a darker tone, with the occasional moment of comic relief — the characters have received enough development by this point that they're able to carry the heavier moments believably.

These episodes draw to a close with Crona confronting his own conflicted loyalties and attempting to make decisions for himself at last, showcasing how much he's grown. Death the Kid, on the other hand, is busy investigating the arrival of the eccentric and perfectly named engineer Joe Buttataki, who seems to be involved in a scheme Lord Death himself is quietly hatching against the overwhelming opposition the DWMA faced.

Soul Eater set three is even less humorous than the second set, devoting only a single filler episode to Excalibur's antics for laughs — you have to appreciate the Sherlock Holmes gags, if nothing else — but in an almost One Piece-ish manner, the show doesn't lose its sense of humor entirely. It's simply more understated now, as I suspect it will continue to be for the remaining episodes, complementing the increasingly dire circumstances of the plot. The leads all got plenty of screen time and focus in this set, though outside of Marie, the other Death Scythes barely appeared at all, and both Stein and Maka's father received minimal screentime as well — the former for good reason, now losing himself to his madness.

These episodes also bring a new opening and ending to the table. From the very beginning, Diggy-Mo's hip hop song "Bakusou Yume Uta" gives you melodic yelping in a catchy new ending that continues through the entire set. And from the thirty-first episode onward, Tommy heavenly6's "Paper Moon" became the new opening with a dark, intense tone that follows T.M. Revolution's "Resonance" well, complete with some fantastic Engrish moments — I'm not sure what she means by "Don't Scary," but that's a sentiment I can get behind. I think.

In Soul Eater, things really only go from bad to worse. Victories for our heroes are fleeting and transitory at best. The villains are always one step ahead, and even if they're killed, they still find a way to bounce back. The show saw some clumsily-executed and rushed plot earlier on as it charged headfirst into melodramatic territory and stumbled about. In the episodes since then, the characters have gradually received more development and the show's successfully regained its footing. The third set continues the second's growing confidence in its story, and it works well. With the DWMA seemingly completely screwed, I'm looking forward to seeing how the kids get out of this mess in the remaining twelve episodes.