i'd actually disagree that the under-laying plot and advancement isn't as important as the characters in this show. Sure, the characters and their interactions are important. Really, they're the driving point of each episode.

But the one thing about this show is that it's not just about 'dudes waiting to die in a post-Apocylptic world'. Almost everybody has a goal for the future. There's a lot of stuff from the past that needs to be settled.

I totally agree though that this episode, while it did a good job showing how much the relationship between Casshern and Friender has come since episode 2, was hard to get into because it focused so much on Friender. Also, personally I couldn't really get into Jin's character too much because he was pretty much a "what you see is what you get" character who isn't going to change his tune (I found Gido much more fascinating, and even the one robot bandit leader who said, "fighting among robots is pointless").