Sometimes an imitation can’t compensate for the real thing.
So, most of this episode is dedicated to the weird maybe-romantic interactions between Atri and Natsuki, specifically focusing on Natsuki trying to work out what he feels and what it’s okay to feel.
And to be honest, this is good material, and material that kind of has to be addressed in a story where you have realistic robots that come off as human as Atri does interacting with normal people. If your story is fantastical enough you probably just treat them as metal people, but if you’re actually interested in doing science fiction rather than futuristic fantasy (not that it isn’t all speculative fiction) there are a lot of fundamental questions about what does or doesn’t have a will or feelings of its own, and what that really means.
The lean from last episode, of course, is to treat Atri as more human. She’s a goober, after all, and that doesn’t feel very robotic in the least. Even Minamo (whose feelings, while less conflicted than they may seem at first, are still at least somewhat conflicted) seems to see Atri as a person, and a decent one at that.
Finally, after a few interactions, Natsuki seems to get his thoughts straight rather than being lost in a daze or just plain confused about it. He decides that Atri is someone, rather than something, and while he certainly doesn’t seem to harbor sexual feelings for her (despite Cathrine’s gift to Atri of some “YES” pillows), he leaves the door open to romance and embarks on treating her as a person.
All would be well, except he wakes up at night when Atri has fallen back asleep writing in her diary. Yeah, it turns out that the diary she was said to keep a few times is something of a Checkov’s Gun, rather than just a bit of fluff detail. In it, Natsuki reads what are presumably her unvarnished inner thoughts. And, it appears, all of Atri’s emotional behaviors are nothing more than calculation and mimicry: she obtains facts and deduces or calculates what people, particularly Natsuki, would want to hear. It’s methodical, mechanical, and clearly feels like a pretty extreme betrayal when he’d finally let himself open up.
Thus, as Atri wakes, Natsuki rebukes her. And that’s where the episode ends.
The story could really go any direction from here. Maybe Atri really is just a rutheless methodical artificial intelligence who only angles to be seen as possessing a human heart because it’s advantageous to her… or maybe she’s an irrational person who rigged up that discovery and the rift it seems poised to cause for some reason.
We as the audience are privy to some information that Natsuki isn’t – we see Atri get a flash of her old memories towards the end of this episode, and an immediate reaction (which could be to nothing else and doesn’t seem to be for Natsuki’s sake) that she seems to be frightened or horrified of what she remembers. Maybe she, recalling something awful about herself or her past, decided things would be better if Natsuki threw her away and both scrawled the pages he read and arranged for him to discover them in order to obtain that outcome. But while a logically cogent theory, that is me just speculating.
What is almost certain is that this movement is what lets Mr. Mech Arm – who we saw briefly and who seemed to have something against Atri – in. Gaining an antagonist, whether a proper villain who wants to do harm or just someone with a vested interest in upsetting the status quo of post-episode-one Natsuki’s life with his little robot girl for whatever motivation, would kick the story into the kind of gear it needs to enter in order to have a proper climax and conclusion. And with four episodes left to Atri, we do kind of need to start moving in a climax-wards direction if we’re going to take our time with it like we have with everything else rather than just springing things in the last moment.
As the countdown commences, we’ll pick back up next week with the results of Natsuki’s disheartening discovery.