Overlord S03E07 Review: The Most Disturbing Mind Flayer Ever

Overlord, Season 3, Episode 7: Butterfly Wrangled In A Spider's Web

Oh, wow, and I thought mind flayers can't get any more disturbing. See, the concept of D&D's Mind Flayers (or Illithid) is pretty scary -- a race of octopus-headed beings from another realm whose diet is people's brains and minds, and they aren't bound by mortal morality. But Neuronist Painkill, a character with an awesome name and an utterly horrifying design, takes that balance between cool, whimsical and horror that mind flayers have, and ramps up the two latter qualities. Neuronist Painkill is this obese mind flayer that looks like a bloated drowned corpse, with what appears to be dominatrix outfit that she barely fits into, which just adds to the sheer wrongness of it all. And she has decorated her bulbous face with cute pretty makeup, eyelashes, face-blushes, and even has these cute painted nails on the tip of her long, tapering fingers. Man, the addition of a couple of extra details just makes this thing extra hilarious and extra disturbing, huh? Oh, and she apparently tortures people by first giving them kidney stones, presumably the hard way in, although we thankfully don't see them. Neuronist is a character that only shows up for a scene in this episode, but god damn that's a horrifying scene.

So, anyway, the four Worker groups show up and sort of lampshade how weird it is for a ruin to show up when no one else has seen it before, and we spend a bit more time with the other Worker guilds, especially Gringham the dwarf-looking dude. They quickly find a whole lot of wealth in the outer mausoleums outside the main tomb, and, well, it's hard to condemn them for wanting to get more. The old man, "Green Leaf" Parpatra, offers to search outside for a way to immediately enter the innermost chamber in exchange for a cut while simultaneously putting his team in a safer place.

The three Worker teams that enter the tomb are besieged by mere skeletons, and they laugh -- Gringham easily bashes through the skeletons, and as they split up, Robberdick is able to use Turn Undead (Robber is gloriously hammy, by the way) to vaporize a bunch of skeletal mages. To them, this is a fun little dungeon run.

Little do they know that Ainz is slowly making his way back. After letting it slip that "they will all die" when questioned by one of the other Adventurers, Momon covers it up and ends up taking a later shift as he switches with Pandora's Actor in the guise of Momon, while he returns to Nazarick to watch the defenses slaughter these grave-robbers... and apparently, Nazarick runs on Iron Man esque holographic panels.

The Green Leaf Worker dudes are the first to fall, with the battle maids (sans Sebas and Narberal) showing up to confront them. We get a hilarious "let's kill them~" from most of the maids when one of them makes the mistake of saying "how distasteful" to have maids guarding a tomb. It's up to Yuri Alpha to get everyone settled down, and then notes that they're here to test the defenses, and in this case, the Nazarick Old Guarders, a group of magic-enchanted skeletons. Green Leaf ends up thinking that the Maids are the 'bosses' of the ruins, but then after a brief cut, they all get slaughtered by the Old Guarders without any problem, with the maids having some fun commenting on the performance of the humans. "Hey, priest, you need to heal your buddy!" And, yeah, the entire team just gets slaughtered by a bunch of not even sentient mooks. Poor chumps.

Meanwhile, Gringham's team is chased by a group of Elder Liches and fireballed all over, and they panic as they run into a random room, before they get teleported -- some of them gets teleported into the realm of a character who has been mentioned a couple of times before (Albedo and Aura are grossed out by him, and Mare apparently used him to torture the Eight Fingers people), Kyohukou, who's apparently... a living giant cockroach with a regal crown, cape and scepter. That's... that's insanely hilarious, but the fate that befell Gringham is pretty horrifying as they are literally devoured by a room full of nothing but cockroaches. My god, that's a bad way to go.

Another member of Gringham's team ends up at the mercies of Neuronist Painkill, who I've already covered as being pretty dang disturbing and horrifying. I really, really don't want to know just how she's going to administer a kidney stone to that dude...

The other team, led by jackass slave-owning swordsman Erya Uzruth, who has been previously compared with Brain Unglaus, ends up encountering, unexpectedly, motherfucking HAMSUKE and the Lizardmen. All of the Lizardmen are wearing slave collars, but they're not chained up to anything and are just there as a cheerleading squad for Hamsuke. It's a bit of a shame that the one member of the Worker team that deserves the most gruesome death, Uzruth, isn't the one trapped in Kyouhukou or Neuronist's chambers, although having his insane amounts of jackass pride (even more than pre-character-development Unglaus, which is impressive) getting shattered when he's beaten by a big-ass hamster is hilarious. Hell, Hamsuke isn't even taking this seriously, because she's just trying to incorporate the teachings of the Lizardmen, and is in fact prepared to take on the entire team on herown.

Uzruth ends up forcing his elf slaves to buff him up... but then Hamsuke ends up blocking most of his attacks, and then using Martial Art: Slash to whack Uzruth's head off with his tail. Yay for Hamsuke learning something! We also get a funny bit where Hamsuke and Zaryusu are just baffled at just why the mentally broken-down elven slaves are kicking Uzruth's fallen body. "They have strange customs of mourning the dead" indeed.

I'm actually happy for Hamsuke! So far the only character we've seen Hamsuke fight is Ainz, and while she clearly is no match for Ainz, and for all this time it honestly seemed that the whole "Wise King of the Forest" moniker ends up being misattributed to this giant docile hamster. But as we see here, apparently Hamsuke is strong enough to one-shot a swordsman at Brain Unglaus' caliber (or so he claims, anyway -- Uzruth might be just full of shit). Granted, that's with training, but suddenly Hamsuke's no longer a joke! Well, in comparison to 'mere mortals', anyway.

The final shot of the episode shows Team Foresight being teleported to what seems to be the outside, apparently for some final showdown against Ainz himself. Now the question is whether Team Arche will manage to do what some of the other supporting characters manage to do, and manage to win Ainz's sympathies to let him make concessions to spare them... or if this is going to be a turning point in Ainz's character, and he'll brutally slaughter these sympathetic characters to proceed with his agenda. After all, with the other humans, you could make the case that the likes of Yuri, Kyohukou, Hamsuke and Neuronist are just following orders. But Ainz is definitely capable of sparing people when he wants to, so it's going to be interesting to see if he's going to do so now.