I see you’ve watched Madoka Magica.
So, this episode is fairly cognate to the episode of Madoka where we finally see Homura’s background. To be more relevant to this picture, we find out that the core left behind by Kugel is a Memory Egg that allows first Koko, and then the others to experience memories of the past. Namely, previous iterations of Kamitsubaki City where they all died before everything simply reset.
The first half of the episode is basically a death reel for our main characters, watching them get slaughtered again and again in various gruesome ways, ostensibly from Kugel’s point of view. This show has been pretty gruesome with its gore all the way from episode zero, but this one is absolutely a parade of making characters’ insides become their outsides, and it spares no one.
In all of this, the idea of “Maxwell” as some kind of end boss comes up again, but it isn’t dwelt on. Instead, the main concept is Phenomenon: the mysterious resetting of Kamitsubaki City that occurs when all within are slain. Once no one is alive, the city returns to a former state (for the most part, memories included) and the tragedy plays out once again. The rub is that, in the loop just before this one, the AI chief managed to jump cut the last human alive – Koko – out of existence for a brief period, allowing the Phenomenon to trigger and Koko to return to a restored Kamitsubaki City with the intent that she’d bring her memories of the dark timelines to help them do it better the next go ’round.
Of course, we know Koko got struck with a bad case of amnesia, but I guess we’re still at the full head count of witchlings as she recovers these memories, so that’s better than nothing.
The second half of the episode, after the other girls receive these memories, is a melancholy little trip for the four of them as they reckon with what this means and where they want to go from here. Rime, for instance, vows to keep fighting and to never give in no matter how many times she has to die. Sekai is resolved to carry on for those that have been lost before. Haru has a harder time, and has to chat with her familiar and sing out her woes, as she worries that she’s trapped in a meaningless existence.
As for Kafu, her issue is less about the loop, and more about the other element from the end of the last episode, how Koko’s song made everyone forget the witch hunt. This frightens Kafu, as she realizes that she might have the ability to overwrite people, not just calming their anger but taking away important and valuable feelings, resulting in her declaring that she’s become unable to sing.
I’ll keep it short this time; this is a pretty good episode for the health of the show, but I’m still not sure the aggregate is going to be all that good in the end. There are, it seems, reasons to watch this show. It does some things that are all its own. But it’s got a hard task to stick the landing.