Time Travel anime. Much like Video Game Anime (aside from the Visual Novel set) have a bad habit of coming out mediocre at best, Time Travel shows have an odd habit of turning out really well. That isn’t to say there aren’t exceptions: RErideD was a notable flop, and not everything else is uniformly great, so despite the topic garnering at least a little interest on its own, the piece does still have to deliver.
This is especially true when you start to get into the genre soup category. Time travel show? Sounds fun, let’s see if that’s right. Schoolkids, mysteries, superpowers for everyone and time regression is involved? It sounds like Sakurada Reset.
You may have guessed some of this matter, but Sakurada Reset takes place in the town of Sakurada, where most of the population seems to possess strange, mysterious powers. One of those powers belongs to Misora Haruki, who can rewind time by three days. This is less awesome than it sounds, because even she can’t remember what was undone. Main character Kei Asai, however, has the power of perfect memory, allowing him to hold on to his memories even across temporal resets. Thus, the two of them working together are quite a bit more than the sum of their parts.
This is set up by Class Rep Sumire Souma, who has them meet and, on the second loop when she’s confronted by Kei, helps navigate the interactions. Supposedly, her purpose is to see Kei and Misora become friends, because Misora has none. Right at the start, we learn the three big rules of Misora’s reset: She has to have a save point to reset to (which lasts for 72 hours), she can’t save again within 24 hours of resetting, and of course resetting hits her as well.
They get involved with a cute little girl, who has a problem where her mother is all set to abandon her and leave town (which will cause mom to forget her abilities). The reason for this is that mom created the daughter with her abilities in grief over a stillbirth of the “real” daughter and has some very complicated feelings about it, which the “Bureau” managing the ability users is keen to push in order to put a pin in such an ability as creating life. By using Resets and even a few other abilities from their friend group, Kei and Misora manage to reunite mother and daughter, such that they’ll stick around and be a happy family again.
After this, Kei has a meaningful talk with Sumire, followed by an encounter with Misora that he asks her to reset. However, in the beta branch of the timeline, Sumire doesn’t come to see him, and instead meets her death while hiking. Because of the somewhat frivolous reset earlier, Misora doesn’t have the power to go back and save Sumire, which comes as a huge blow to Kei in particular.
The series then moves us to two years later, with the guy from the Bureau who was rather reasonable recruiting the pair of new high-schoolers into a “club” where they’ll be able to use their powers for good once more.
This is the first two episodes of Sakurada Reset, and from this distance we can tell a few things about the show, so we might as well get some of the basic things out of the way at this juncture.
Sakurada Reset is slow, quiet, and thinky. Both Kei and Misora have issues connecting with human emotions – explicitly so – and thus come off as these rather aloof and potentially even robotic characters. In fact, the “robotic” aspect is pulled up in-character, as Misora’s initial rules for her own conduct are likened to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Kei, for his part I want to say is something of a misanthrope but that doesn’t really cover it. Sumire would point out that there’s clearly part of him that wants to be a good person in the conventional, but his standard of “good” is rather strange and specific, meaning he can’t imagine applying it to someone who is really human.
This is expressed across a number of quiet conversations between Kei and the two main girls, in which Kei and Misora seldom emote at all, and Sumire’s emotions, while expressed in a very charming and human way, are also not given the typical overacting that feelings normally get in media.
All the same, it’s to the credit of this show that, already, and despite the affect of the characters being little more than flat, they do come off as characters even as of the end of episode 2. Misora is someone with a dark past, who pretty much abused herself into her robotic state, and is starting to learn humanity again through her interactions with Kei – something that’s shown very subtly where after the two-year time skip, Misora smiles very naturally in the first scene in which we see her, something she never did throughout the rest of the opening act. Kei’s self-deception is called out, and we can see it at work enough to know that Sumire is on the mark when she identifies how he operates. We know he wants to do things, to interfere, and to make some of the world’s sadness go away, but that he locks himself in this shell of not doing anything “unnecessary”
And when Sumire dies, it’s handled in a very particular way. We don’t see her body, visit a funeral, or watch anybody really cry or scream too much. Kei learns from the news, we get several silent shots that indicate how he feels, and then we get a scene with Misora where the emotions come out and it’s still not a matter of sobbing and wailing: Kei is sad, and admits that he’s sad, and you understand from the framing that he must feel guilty as well because of how relatively frivolous the Reset he called for, that set Sumire’s death in stone, was. Misora cries, shedding tears not for herself or even really for Sumire, but because she’s connected with Kei and can cry because he’s sad. All the same, we’ve already come to understand that there is a person in there, so that’s probably more of an outlet that allows her to express her feelings than anything else.
And then the sequence ends. We move the timeline ahead. It’s two years later and our leads move up from middle school to high school, ready to take on something new. All in all, while this certainly will figure in, the understatement is what sells it as being part of life more than anything.
The next arc begins with a lost cat. Or rather, a deceased cat. A reset is pulled and connections are made with an information broker and a cat whisperer to save the cat, but a few odd things come to light. The cat was a stray, not the requester’s. The bureau shouldn’t approve requests that aren’t ability related. And, abnormally, it seems as though the future changes in unpredictable ways when this reset occurs, with a new conversation at school and an odd encounter with the woman and cat… and a classmate appearing as a ghost who wasn’t there before.
The trip down the rabbit hole leads to the mastermind. This is the woman who made the request, Youka Murase, who wants to take on the Bureau because she thinks their support of the status quo isn’t good enough. Her actions seem harsh, but they aren’t as serious as she makes herself out to be, as proved when Kei calls her to heel with an admittedly grisly method to make her admit defeat – sacrificing himself to her destructive ability to prove she couldn’t bear taking a life. Thus, she agrees to become their Senpai again and work with them to hopefully, in the future, reform the Bureau from the inside.
After a one-off case, things start to take off in the next arc, which introduces a few important things.
One, though technically introduced earlier, is the Macguffin. I don’t mean the plot device, I mean an item that people in the show refer to by that name in reference to the plot device. This Macguffin is a small stone that is said to somehow control the abilities of Sakurada. The rumor seems absurd to most, and the identified rock seems powerless, but all the same there are many individuals who want to possess it. Youka was one, and more appear in this arc.
The second is “The Witch”, a woman confined by the Bureau and used for her ability to see the future. She is very old, and soon to die, but in the past she was why Kei settled in Sakurada. She was also, before Abilities emerged and the Bureau was founded, lovers with a man whose ability became creating pictures that could be entered, who she wants to see again for her last week alive.
The third is Eri Oka, Kei’s kouhai who he more or less saved from her physically abusive father years ago, but who now resents that he’s become someone different thanks to those experiences around poor dead Sumire. She has a memory manipulation ability now, which can even lock off others from using their abilities. It is at least reversible, or this show wouldn’t live up to its premise seeing as Misora becomes a victim of this at one point. Eri in the present takes on a kind of punk mentality, and wants to be a dastardly villain in ways she can’t really walk the walk on.
This comes together with an arc where, on one timeline, Eri is scheduled to rescue the Witch, but in doing so will become an enemy of the Bureau and thus without a future in Sakurada. After sparring with her earlier in the arc, Kei’s last movement here is to see the Witch off as she wants to be seen off, without anyone becoming an enemy of the state so to speak.
As she prepares to leave, the Witch looks into Kei’s future and drops a bombshell: he’ll become embroiled in a major incident surrounding her successor, the next person to bear the ability of future sight. And that successor is none other than Sumire, who he’ll be seeing again soon.
The mechanism for how is somewhat established as Sumire happened to be caught in one of the photos that the Witch’s boyfriend took, which Kei now has in his possession and obviously wanted to enter in order to see her again, since despite his “it’s complicated and they’re both emotionally messed up” with Misora, he clearly has some serious hangups regarding Sumire. Saying she has (had?) the ability to see the future also explains a good deal, since we see with the Witch that future sight is one of the abilities that can change outcomes in a Reset. (Youka’s is actually another, since she can make herself immune to abilities This is used to have her ferry items through resets)
On that bombshell is also where the show decides to cut to the immediate wake of Sumire’s death, giving us a whole episode only two weeks later, where Misora is having trouble resetting and Kei… is just plain having trouble. He hides away, fearing how he’ll make Misora cry if he can’t put on a brave face, and is devastated when the Bureau won’t intervene regarding Sumire’s case. After a talk with a woman at the site of Sumire’s death, where he hears the theory that she may have committed suicide, he tries to bring himself around. After working up the will to command another Reset (as Misora can no longer do it on her own for reasons of conflicted emotions), Kei comes to his conclusion. With all the abilities that exist in Sakurada, there must be a way to restore Sumire to life. Nothing less will assuage his guilt and grief, so he’ll seek it as long as it takes.
Thus, that’s what he embarks on doing in the present. With a photo of Sumire made using the ability to enter, and Youka’s negation ability that can, with reset, pull something out, Kei finally has all the pieces to pull off something of a resurrection, though worries about the “swamp man” thought experiment (which also figured in Summertime Render, oddly enough) abound. There is the worry, of course, that Sumire seems to have planned all of this, her death and return, even creating the Macguffin to bring together all the necessary pieces
The plan goes off, oddly enough, without a hitch, and Kei is able to speak with the person he lost once more. In theme with this show, their conversation is about as low-key as it is important. Sakurada reset is the kind of piece that says a lot in a way where you’d think it’s saying less, or perhaps that seeks to appeal to intellectual curiosity more than raw emotion.
Of course, now the issue is that Sumire Soma, Successor to the Witch who can see the future, has returned to Sakurada. We immediately move to… a lower deck episode giving us insight into the strange inner world of Misora, how she tries to make a friend at Kei’s offhand suggestion and how she frets about what she does when she doesn’t have someone else calling the shots for her. It’s a good, long look at where and who one of our main characters is now, but it’s also almost humorous in how much it doesn’t take that huge event and leap off of it.
Following that charming non-sequitur, we have Kei and the gang investigate the dream-world created by the power of a comatose girl. Kei at first wants to investigate it because he wants a testing ground that would be safe, in order to see if he could get Sumire out of Sakurada to a place where she can live happily as a normal girl. The Dream World is bounded to Sakurada, and thus not really useful for that, but intruding on it causes the gang to meet Michiru (the dream form of the world’s creator), Chiruchiru (her creation, who she believes to be the true god of this world), and a monster that comes out at night to rampage. Sumire also seems to visit the dream world, and meets with Chiruchiru to plot, and to express that she seems kind of jealous of how well Kei and Misora get along now.
While our leads are not an item due to both being too weird, I do have to say Sumire kind of did this to herself.
On a return visit to the dream world, we meet an old man who has come to reside there, known as the Stray Cat House Man. His ability is to create “The Script”, which is another different mechanism of future sight from the ones possessed by Sumire or the Witch, likened to Laplace’s Demon. Sumire also sent along the message to read one volume of The Script with care, but that volume is in the Bureau’s hands rather than existing in the dream world. This is a problem as forces within the Bureau are already unfond of Kei, potentially to the point of wanting to rub him out.
Kei then makes a plan to help save the dreamworld and enlist the aid of Chiruchiru, in order to accomplish his goals. Doing this requires a reset, however, which erases a bit of character growth from Misora where Chiruchiru made her face her inner self and come to a conclusion. In the new timeline, Kei intervenes to force Michiru to face up to the fact that her “paradise” is false because she’s still lonely, and also to cure her loneliness by having her meet up with the Stray Cat House Man who basically has to live in her dreamworld anyway, giving her social contact with something that isn’t her.
After that, the school culture festival comes and goes, with Kei and Misora moving a step towards couple status as he at least makes his stance between Misora and Sumire clear. Sumire… is not doing so well.
In addition, she starts working with a Bureau insider who has a scheme to remove all abilities from Sakurada, a plan which she seems to support even as she works on some sort of side game by directing Kei around without telling him why
This turns out to lure him onto the conspiracy’s plan: fake spontaneous ability triggers the first Witch didn’t predict to scare the Bureau into using their nuclear option to wipe out all abilities. The baddies are largely successful, and begin to lock away the abilities of dangerous individuals in preparation for the final act.
This includes, ultimately, targeting Misora, who has her time rewound to before she met Kei… but since it’s Eri Oka who does the ability sealing, there’s still a chance to deal with that. In a similar timeframe, Sumire visits Kei. She makes curry, explains everything, and has herself a nice little mental breakdown over how the past version of her, who she doesn’t see as the same person, pushed all the hard parts onto current Sumire and fled into death.
She chose to have this conversation while in the shower because she knew she would cry.
Shortly after, the big event is pulled, and all of Sakurada is set to a state where no one remembers about abilities except, of course, for Kei. In this timeline it seems he’s classmates with a Sumire who never died (but who is still… a little odd in a way that recreates a conversation they had the first time – incidentally breaking her heart in this reality too), while Misora was taken ill in middle school and has only just recovered, probably to patch over her time regression. Kei takes advantage of the situation to go to his home town and run into his mother, who can’t remember him but who still manages to give him some very important closure.
On returning to Sakurada, he meets up with an ignorant Misora and reveals his trump card: one last photograph from the man with the ability to create photos one could enter. Bringing her into the photo brings her to a Sakurada where abilities weren’t erased, and lets Misora reset to three days earlier, on the Ability timeline.
This is done through a really good scene where Kei finally admits his faults and even sheds a tear (recalling Misora’s pre-Kei rule to reset if she sees someone cry) The emotional stuff in this show is extremely slow-burn, but it does get there.
In the reset timeline, Kei visits the Sumire photo again, using a friend with mind-sharing power to utilize her precognition (as Sumire 2 told him to), in order to save Soma 2 and start down the golden path to a saved Sakurada. This ends with Sumire 2 faking her death Kei being prepared for what comes next.
What follows is a meeting with the Bureau mastermind – several meetings in fact, in which Kei uses every ability at his disposal in an attempt to win a war of words. It takes several rounds, but finally a huge emotional speech is able to break through, not to the mastermind, but to his trusted henchman, who decides to side with Kei. This ends the scheme, after which the mastermind can finally be persuaded to work for something better, thus solidifying Kei’s master plan to one day rise to the top of the Bureau and transform it into an organization that solves misery rather than one that contains abilities.
However, despite the main plot being resolved, Sumire is still in this picture. The last episode belongs entirely to her.
After returning from a jaunt out of Sakurada, the weight of her feelings and memories seems to cause Sumire to collapse. She ends up retreated into the Dream World, where she has Chiruchiru make her something of a demiurge. Kei meets her there, and she challenges him to a game: if he wins, they’ll do things his way, and find a future where Sumire can be happy in the real world. If she wins, they live her happily ever after in the dream, even if as a stone. The challenge? To say the name of the person in front of him. Essentially, to answer if she’s Sumire Soma or not.
Before we see how this really resolves, we get a dynamite scene between Sumire and Misora (who was separated from Kei) where Sumire gloats like she’s already won, tries to provoke Misora into resetting on her own, and ultimately succumbs to a heart-to-heart where the two girls admit they’re essentially jealous of each other. Misora wants to be capable and helpful like Sumire, Sumire wants to be loved like Misora. They seem to come out of that a lot better and agree to return to the real world, where Kei has already woken up
After they reach their catharsis, we get the resolution of Sumire and Kei. He doesn’t even hesitate to name her as Sumire Soma, and we get a good crying it out scene from the two of them before Kei wakes up. Thus, we reach the ending where the Bureau and its system are on a road to reform where people may not need to be sacrificed to maintain it, Kei and Misora seem set up as romantic partners, Sumire is determined to be the best work partner she can be to at least outshine Misora there, and the future is looking up. The end.
So, as I may have pointed out before, the closest touchstone materials for Sakurada Reset are, with little doubt, Summertime Render, Steins;Gate, and Haibane Renmei. And one may notice something about this company: they’re all shows that I’ve rated at A+, and they’re some of my most dedicated A+ ranks at that, a trio of honest masterpieces. That’s an extremely high bar to step up to.
The similarities to Steins;Gate and Summertime Render, though, are more in content. The Reset ability in Sakurada Reset plays out similarly to Okarin’s time manipulation, both the D-mails and especially the time leap machine in the second half. It also has some similarities to Shinpei’s looping ability, but I think it feels a lot more like the Time Leap Machine. Summertime Render gets extra points for the philosophy. Both Summertime Render and Sakurada Reset bring up the Swampman thought experiment in a huge way, with the various Shadows in Render and Sumire 2 in Sakurada having to be concerned over whether a seemingly perfect copy is actually an equivalent being. You could also draw comparisons to the core love triangle, where A and B are involved but C also likes A and has some pretty severe hangups, but Mio (C in Summertime Render) is downplayed overall while Sumire (C in Sakurada Reset) is arguably the whole point. I’ll get back to her in a bit.
Part of this is because, when it comes to genre and structure, that’s where I feel like Sakurada Reset and Haibane Renmei share a good deal. It doesn’t look like it on the surface: Haibane Renmei dives deep into Slice of Life, with very little in the way of “plot” until the halfway point. Even then, it’s more about the struggle of one girl, initially an outsider to her setting, finding a place than it is about stuff happening. Sakurada Reset has a conspiracy to mess with the way of the world and several arcs dealing with various supernatural incidents.
But both shows spend a lot of time – an obsessive lot of time – on characters talking in thematic but overall nondescript settings, often quietly discussing their various issues. I love Haibane Renmei, I think it’s an absolute masterpiece and have happily rewatched it… but very little happens in that show. And compared to its running time, Sakurada Reset is in a similar place.
One thing I want to highlight, that I may have pointed out earlier, is how strong the philosophical talk in this show is. It’s not just the Swampman – a good number of philosophies and classical thought experiments are brought up explicitly, along with some that seem to belong to Sakurada Reset alone. They’re often discussed in an oblique fashion, with characters addressing the hypotheticals and not screaming about how this connects to what they’re going through. But it always connects to what they’re going through. In the first couple episodes, Sumire talks about “Androids”, and tasks Kei with deciding who among the group is one. Only much later, once we’re dealing with her second incarnation and know her power, do we understand (as Kei does explicitly draw the link for the audience that time) that she was talking about herself – with foresight, she felt she was only acting automatically as a machine and not thinking or feeling as a human. Yet at the time it was interesting as well, because of how it tied in to studying Misora
This is similar to a lot of the talk in Haibane Renmei, like when they bring up the Circle of Sin and we only slowly understand what it means in full. It’s philosophical talk, which is easy to gutterball, but instead it hits a bullseye by being tied to the material yet not a truncheon of obviousness to bludgeon the viewer semiconscious with philosophy.
I talked about the pace earlier, but Sakurada Reset does stay fairly deliberate, even as it involves itself in arcs. Most emblematic of this is that the last two arcs are dealing with the plot to remove abilities, and they are four and five episodes. More than a third of the show’s run is bound up there, so it’s not like they’re doing case of the week.
But if you have the patience for it, Sakurada Reset rewards you. It builds slowly but surely, and makes good use of its time to deeply paint its few central characters. This show, when you get down to it, is about three people: Kei, Misora, and Sumire. They get a massive amount of effort focused on them, allowing side characters and arc characters to exist to the side, and the show really benefits from how well you come to understand them.
This is critical, especially because of how flat affect Misora is. Anyone who’s followed my reviews for a while will probably know that I am not the world’s biggest fan of flat affect characters, because it’s easy to write them poorly so that they give you nothing at all. If you can’t know them, you can’t like them, plain and simple. But Misora uses her flat affect very well. It’s not absolute. From the very start, we understand something about her, in how she can’t stand to see someone crying, and her slow process of coming out of her shell, making a friend, and coming to trust Kei is the beginning of a long, long arc that ultimately leads to that dynamite scene in the last episode between her and Sumire where Misora still doesn’t raise her voice, but does express through her actions and the tells you’ve been conditioned to watch for the wealth of emotions she now has.
Kei is a lesser case. He emoted more than Misora to start, so his growth is less dramatic, but we still need to understand him completely in order to accept his goal for the future and the humanity inherent in it. And Sumire needs a lot of exploration because there has to be a balance between who she is and what she is. Both are important to the story.
And while I’ve repeatedly commented on the show being slow, calm, and quiet, it’s not as though the individual stories aren’t engaging. While much of that engagement comes from important conversations, the cunning use of supernatural powers and reset-based plans isn’t lacking. It’s actually rather absorbing, all things considered, to see how the schemes to set right what went wrong last time fall into place.
All in all, facing down the three titans that it’s most comparable to, Sakurada Reset does remarkably well. It’s not quite on the same level as any of the three. It’s engaging, but Summertime Render was a tour de force. It’s clever and creative, but Steins;Gate was genius. It’s thoughtful, but Haibane Renmei was moving.
That said, it comes a good part of the way on those scales, so where do I really rate it? I still gave A+ to Robotics;Notes even though it wasn’t quite at the same level as Steins;Gate, because while A+ is the highest bracket it is still a bracket.
But I do think Sakurada Reset doesn’t quite make it there. It makes it to A, and that’s where the grade rests. It takes a lot of time to build steam and you have to be able to get into the characters while they’re still playing very quiet notes, and it doesn’t have quite the emotional impact it could in the end, focusing more on thinking than feeling.
Final Grade: A
If you haven’t seen Sakurada Reset yet, go ahead and search it up, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
And this is where I would normally cut the review, but I did promise something of an aside on Sumire. Specifically, it didn’t really fit anywhere else, but I wanted to talk about character development and Sumire’s role in the love triangle.
The Sakurada Reset triangle is one of the classics, where there is an outside character looking in, pining for one half of the happy couple. And this triangle typically gets played one of two ways. Either the outsider is creepy and/or dangerous, or she (it’s almost always a she in this case) ends up getting more character development and pathos than the primary lead, which risks the audience attaching more to the one that nobody loves and thus the whole thing leaving a sour taste.
Sumire, naturally, cleaves closer to the latter half. I think she spends at most a couple minutes in the last episode seeming threatening in the least, when she’s messing with Misora and it doesn’t take… and her feelings are given a great deal of weight. It’s stated that First Sumire’s suicide was specifically to create a dissonance that would allow her second incarnation to get around a lie detector power by rejecting her identity, or to ensure that she wouldn’t be acquired by the Bureau in the intervening time… but there’s also some implication that what pushed her over the edge was realizing that she’d basically thrown away her chance with Kei by setting him up with Misora.
And once we’re on second Sumire, she’s much more forward about what she wants. Of course by that time Kei has had two years with Misora, growing quietly closer, and so her appeal falls on deaf ears. All the same, she seems to regard herself as someone who exists for Kei’s sake. She calls him her protagonist, the hero of the story that she devised with her precognative powers, bit it’s clear that her affection is much more normal, grounded in the basic human impulse that being with him makes her happy.
There is a certain tragedy to it. Sumire sacrifices her life and her identity. She gives up everything she is, and more than once at that, and it’s strongly implied that the main reason for this is Kei’s happiness. Because, when you get down to it, if the bad guy wins… Sumire gets a good deal of what she wants. She mentions that her power doesn’t protect her sense of self, and in general she’s not fond of it and even less fond of the idea of becoming a nameless defense system like the first Witch. If she could be a normal schoolgirl in a world with Kei, that would be a pretty good scenario for her.
Yet she hatches this huge plan, a plan that requires her own death, and enacts it in order to promote Kei to protagonist and protect the mystical Sakurada with abilities. What motive could she have for this? Well, Kei’s memory ability is the big one. In a Sakurada overwritten, where Sumire can be normal, Kei is the one who is suffering and isolated, because he of course can still remember. There’s a moment at the end where she says this wasn’t the case, after recovering her memories, but I’m not sure what her aim was if her crush didn’t figure into it.
But a strength of Sakurada reset is that while Sumire’s devotion, and how little it gets her the reward she desires, might be heartbreaking in a sense (with some of the show’s best emotional scenes given to her: facing Kei in the final episode and having her crying breakdown in the shower earlier), it doesn’t feel like she’s being inordinately, unfairly, or inexplicably passed over.
Part of this is that Kei clearly does have deep feelings for Sumire. They’re not romantic, but I don’t think he would have been so desperate to bring just anyone back from the dead, even if he felt at least somewhat responsible due to the reset. Part is Misora. Since we see Misora grow into a more complete human over twenty four episodes, we can understand what Kei sees in her. She gets more screen time than Sumire and while she’s starting in this very weird place where it would be hard to swallow if this were the middle school scenario, by the time the bulk of the show is running? She’s a fine romantic lead. Still a very strange person, but also someone who fits with Kei and who we can believe he would have affection for.
Because of how core this is, there’s a degree to which you could classify Sakurada Reset as a romance, and in a romance it’s critical to like the proper couple… and also critical, in the case of a drama like this, to give a really critical rival like Sumire the time and respect she deserves.
Everyone reacts to media differently, because we bring in our own biases and preferences, but I think Sakurada Reset played an excellent balancing game when it came to Sumire. There’s a lot you can read into her actions, and a lot you can care about her feelings… but while I’m sure some people would have preferred a different resolve I don’t think she’s automatically or even usually going to supplant Misora for most viewers. So, call this post-script an acknowledgment of an artful execution of a common plot.