Episode 4 brings the show back to what it promised from the beginning: Hiro and 002 piloting robots to together and beating up little Godzilla worms. There are several plot decisions that make absolutely no sense and there is a lot of extremely questionable dialogue.
Unfortunately, Mitsuru lived through his ordeal last episode. While this makes sense from a narrative perspective, that being to not kill off characters that the viewers will have no attachment to, it is disappointing from a action-consequence perspective. Mitsuru screwed up and Mitsuru should be dead. Him surviving isn't a big deal, though, especially considering how useless him and the rest of the squad are.
If it wasn't clear enough already, the director is making sure you realise how much of a wish fulfillment show this is. 002 wants Hiro so badly that she will walk through a bath with no regard for anything other than Hiro. This sort of fanservice is frustrating to watch if you are anything that is not a 14 year old boy. It is very blatant, there is no mood and with the dry cast of characters it comes off as forced and unnecessary.
The "cinematic" black bars appear once again this episode. They are usually used as a stylistic choice to signal the viewer when a scene is supposed to be important. It comes off as annoying and pretentious because it adds nothing. The directing in this show so far has been nothing to talk about. Luckily for us, we saw one of the first action scenes in several episodes which wasn't underwhelming and bad. The scene involved saving a bunch of useless teammates and there was a fair bit of robot animation for everyone. There was a decent amount of animation in the scene where 002 runs back to Hiro after he essentially begged her to have sex pilot a robot with him.
Hiro having to beg his dominant waifu to do things were her is a strange feminist sort of message where women are superior to men and that men need to get permission from their woman to do anything. It's very pathetic, on similar levels to Shinji Ikari. Men and women with a healthy relationship do not need to ask such robotic questions. It's always a bad look for a man to ask for a kiss or to ask to bang. The show seems to be encouraging this, for some reason.
The sexual innuendo becomes blatant sexual statements. This is possibly a good thing because the show is now honest about what it is. However, the dialogue becomes far more unbearable and sounds very similar to Nasu's Fate/Stay Night. With this self aware awful dialogue, Darling in the FranXX drifts further away from being a show to have fun and take seriously and more towards being a joke of a show that you might consider watching if you like watching disasters pan out.
As seen in the picture above, Hiro's team is once again shown to be completely and utterly useless. Not only have their required Strelizia to rescue them twice, but they keep getting sent on missions that the brass knows they will fail. This raises some serious questions about the organisation. Are there other pilots elsewhere that can be used? Why do the brass not want Hiro and 002 to pilot together when they can clearly work together? Why do the guys at the top want to call away 002 conveniently when she is needed to save some pilots? The world has no fleshing out and the organisation which seemingly runs everything is pathetic.
This show will continue to be a bad joke that went on for too long. There aren't any exciting moments. There isn't any good character interaction or dialogue. The plot is sparse. The animation is decent at best but only comes around every couple episodes. There is still not much to like about the show, but it's worth giving credit to the amusingly badly written dialogue.