Karen’s still cryptic
One plot point this episode
So what else is new?
So this episode we recap last episode and follow up with Karen getting a copy of Yuito’s power after a little more of a struggle. This puts Yuito in a bad way where he nearly goes braindead from the loss of his memories until his friends are able to use their memories of him and the city supercomputer that’s right there in order to fix it. End episode as the nation reels from last episode’s broadcast, with the arrival of Fubuki who tries and fails to say something before the credits roll.
That’s basically the whole episode, with a huge chunk taken up by everyone just chanting Yuito’s name as they try to remember him back into existence. Granted, I get what they were trying to do with the scene, and there’s a degree to which it works, but it’s still overwrought and silly for what it is. It’s not going to get any tears and might earn a laugh if the viewer is in a particular mood going in.
That said, there are a few notes that stuck out here. One is that Karen goes ahead and time travels after stealing Yuito’s power in combination with Kasane’s. Um… game over? Far be it from me to say I deeply understand the time travel rules specific to Scarlet Nexus, but a big source of drama just a couple episodes back was the fact that Togetsu would use the power for time travel to undo things and, in so doing destroy the timeline the characters inhabit. So, in order to keep the people we care about in existence, we want to stop them. That’s good, it makes sense. Now Karen wants to use the power of time travel to reset the current scenario, hitting reset and presumably undoing and then doing differently everything that’s happened in the show so far, the chain of events that lead to the death of Alice. So, if he gets the power and performs time travel, why are we still here? Shouldn’t this timeline be overwritten? Maybe not all of it, because he’s presumably not going back far enough that Yuito will never be born or anything, but enough that we shouldn’t be in our present situation.
If this show were better I’d trust that the mechanics of time travel would be explained in such a way that the show would still matter at this point, but Scarlet Nexus has been so on the edge that I’m not sure we’ll ever get a satisfying answer.
The other detail, though much more minor, is that Hanabi came right out of nowhere to act like she’s relevant. Yeah, Hanabi, remember her? It’s okay if you don’t as she was never worthwhile enough to even drop her name before. She’s the pyrokineticist on Yuito’s team and if you just watched this episode you’d think that she was his main love interest, hopeful or actual. I’m still deliberately leaving off playing the game so I don’t know, maybe she is at least a front and center contender for “Yuito’s main squeeze” status. But in the show so far she’d been filler for action scenes until suddenly right here the distribution of lines and framing of shots decided to push her to the forefront like she always belonged there. Did we just get a new writer this episode who came in with the personal opinion of “Hanabi best girl” and decided to make it canon?
I don’t strictly mind, but it’s a little jarring to have the personality-deprived tertiary character step up in a visual storytelling and scene framing sense with literally no additional introduction. I guess I can look forward to her future… um… existence? No reason to believe she won’t vanish into the background as quickly as she emerged from it.
Well, however that goes, and despite the fact that Karen should just have ended everything, it’s clear that the ride’s not over yet.