A scheme revealed
Burn up a nation for spite
Rest in peace, Nagi
At least the show is looking up.
This episode essentially focuses on Yuito’s group. They enter the city to find it on lockdown, with security forces standing by rather than attacking or intercepting. Nagi, brainwashed and crazy and more powerful than ever, is brought out to attack them, and does a pretty good job aiming for Yuito’s head. He even manages to weather the first couple friendship speeches hurled his way, which is really an achievement all things considered.
After Yuito brings the fight to their old secret training ground, though, the mind control starts to predictably break down, causing him to be at war with himself as well as with Yuito and crew. Between the psychological instability and overuse of his power, Nagi’s brain burns out and he finally dies for real.
On one hand, the action here is just as dubious as it always was. It’s not the worst, but the animation is a little subpar for action animation, the pacing is a little wonky, the visual storytelling is a little scattered, the general choreography isn’t quite what you want it to be… it’s not a great action scene. On the other hand, I give Scarlet Nexus credit that it actually did establish and use the emotions germane to the scene. It was established that Yuito and Nagi had their secret training ground, and that their bond as friends meant a lot to Yuito, so we do get it when he has to watch Nagi expire, that it has to hurt. Is it one of the better emotional scenes in anime? No, not by a long shot. But is it at least competent, doing what it set out to do more or less? Yeah, it hits that bar.
After that, Yuito goes to confront his big brother. We get a reasonably brisk exposition of what’s going on. Yes, big brother is kinda evil, responsible for such things as sending out Nagi in a nonsensical effort to get Yuito to come to him. Considering Nagi was set to “Bring him in dead”, I’m not sure how that was meant to work. Further, big brother is working on the ancient plan of the founder (who is still alive in cryosleep), which is to use gravity power (aka Yuito’s) to shift the Extinction Belt out of the way and attack and destroy the Moon people for what they did. The whole family has dedicated the country to this effort, and big brother in particular is willing to give Yuito the power boost he needs to be done with the Extinction Belt by wiring up every brain in the country in parallel, a process that would kill all the normal people involved.
Yuito rightly tells his brother off for wanting to sacrifice an entire nation for a spiteful vengeance against people who might not exist for (admittedly very serious) deeds done two millennia ago, and with a little help from the party teleporter, makes it out. It turns out that they managed to get the audio and video of that conversation recorded at that. This means that the new plan is to follow Major General Fubuki’s plan and broadcast that to every citizen. They need to get to the supercomputer to do it, so that’s presumably where we’ll see them next time.
Kasane’s team, meanwhile, has some ideas of how to approach their city’s leadership, only to see that the human-derived Others are being moved, which gives Kasane quite a fright, thinking about her sister. That’s the end of the episode, though, so presumably where we’ll be following up next time.