Last episode on Mirai Nikki, Yuno and Yukiteru managed to fight a five-year-old child to a draw, which they won via the tiebreaker of having Minene come drag them out of the cloud of poison gas they had collapsed in due to expending all their available energy defeating a five-year-old child. Can’t wait to see what thrilling opponent they’ll be pitted again next – a small yappy dog, who can tell the future via a series of peed-upon lampposts? I’m sure it will tax their resources immensely to face such a terrible threat. I’ll be at the edge of my seat throughout episode 8 of Mirai Nikki.
…thirty minutes pass…
Haha, looks like Yukiteru's gonna be sleeping on the couch tonight!
Man, I was close! It turns out that instead of a small yappy dog, their opponent is a cunning, manipulative woman with an army of vicious war-dogs at her command. Still, I got the “dog” part right, so I figure I deserve partial credit.
I feel like this episode was a little rushed. We could easily have spent an entire episode getting Yukiteru and Yuno settled in a their new school. We could meet all the new characters in a less threatening context, have some nice school comedy slice of life stuff. They tried to cram some of that in, but I would have liked to have spent more time on Yuno going crazy at the thought that Yukiteru might make friends other than her before we found out those people weren’t really his friends. (She was adorable writing “die” in the dirt with her foot <3) And especially we could have spent more time with Hinata establishing her relationship to Yukiteru. It kind of dulls the impact of each event for her character to be introduced, killed off, and then have it revealed she was faking her death all in the same episode. If I had been brought to care about her, I might have cared when she was mauled, or cared that she wasn’t mauled after all. (Assuming she wasn’t in fact mauled! Maybe the Hinata that showed up is some sort of doppelganger that took on her form.)
I am super excited for Akise Aru, though. I’m getting a kind of “Joshua from The World Ends With You” vibe from him. He’s got the white hair, the smug and arrogant demeanor with the intelligence to back it up, and the semi-ironic homosexual flirtation. Joshua was one of my favorite characters in anything. And he seems like exactly the sort of person you should have playing in this Survival Game. He’s not a lunatic, or a blind shut-in, or a lunatic, or a social-phobic shut-in, or a lunatic, or a literal five-year-old child, or a lunatic. He and Hinata and Kurusu can go play the game like it ought to be played, with high level bluffs and feints and traps and information collection and armies of war-dogs, and leave Yuno and Yukiteru to play out their middle-school romantic drama in peace.
So this marks another time that someone Yukiteru thought was his friend immediately turned on him and tried to kill him. I guess the moral of this story is, just because you have social phobia doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you. Yuno, at least, managed to learn her lesson from last time, when she thought everyone in class was Yukiteru’s friend. This time she got it right, Yukiteru just didn’t listen to her (pictured above). Possibly the lesson she should draw from this failure is that she can no longer grant Yukiteru the luxury of free will, because he uses it to disregard her excellent advice. Once this is all over, perhaps a few brainwashing sessions are in order. You know, for his own good. Everything is for Yukiteru’s good. Of course.
suntzuanime 
While I agree that this episode felt rushed and that it could take some more time setting up the dramatic payoff later, the sad fact is that the anime doesn’t have the luxury of time. The manga is about Fifty nine chapters long, not counting the supplemental material in the two additional series.
The anime will only air 26 episodes. That’s cramming over 2 chapters in 20 minutes. Since the adaptation is pretty much faithful on the whole, this pace will be par for the course the rest of the way.