Flashback time is here
Love triangle in the past
But enough of that!
Most of this episode belongs to a fairly needed flashback to the history of Fubuki, Karen, and Alice, framed as the story told by Fubuki to the main group about why things are the way they are. We see that they met as kids and became friends (all of them). Karen and his brother were Duds and thus lived at the hospital being given, presumably, a similar dubious treatment to the one that worked out for Yuito, eventually of course working out for them.
In the meantime, Fubuki and Alice visited the brothers and befriended them. The two of them were already arranged to marry by their families, but Karen clearly developed a deeply frustrated crush on Alice, the feelings involved in which may have been reciprocated if some blushing moments in the trio’s OSF days are anything to go by. At least Karen may have gotten the wrong idea while playing hero for Alice for the millionth time. Eventually, of course, they end up in a tough situation, dealing with swarms of others where a rare event has caused the Extinction Belt to reach ground, mutagenic particles included. When some of the bad stuff starts to flow into the area where Alice and Karen are (Fubuki playing rear guard), Alice shoves Karen out of the way and gets Otherized herself in a scene that very strongly recalls what happened to Naomi.
After that, Karen and Fubuki rescue Alice from imprisonment and horrible experimentation… to throw her into longer-term imprisonment and slightly less evil experimentation in Seiran. Fubuki recognizes the hypocrisy but Karen is determined to never let Alice go no matter what, establishing how they sort of started the show having the same motivation (love for Alice) but fundamentally different outlooks on how to handle that motivation. Which is, when you get down to it, a very good conflict that lets the characters be at odds with each other in an organic and understandable way. Pity we’re only getting it now when we’re about 2/3 of the way through this show. It’s not strictly too late for us to be learning about these major movers, and doing it after Karen travels through time (which in a sense had to be a somewhat later plot movement) does make sense, bit it’s just a little painful that this is exactly the sort of thing we needed earlier when we were aimlessly meandering through the story.
As for Karen’s time travel, the group suggests that he may be stuck in a “But the future refused to change” scenario where, by the fact that all established events are still established even after Karen time traveled, and the lines he spouted about hitting reset as many times as it takes, he has been unable to actually alter time. Because of that, and presumably because there’s not a whole lot they can do about a rogue time traveler anyway, they decide to deal with Togetsu instead. A plan is very quickly hatched to have Fubuki attempt to broker a ceasefire between Suoh and Seiran in the face of their mutual enemy while the kids go back to Togetsu to wreck the cult’s supercomputer as that would cost them all the planning and research they’d ever done, presumably destroying the threat of Togetsu resetting time.
Before they commit to the plan, though, Kagero has a confession to make, revealing in a big staged way that he’s the one who killed Yuito’s father. Um… thanks, I guess? We know you were invisible in the area, so it’s not as though this is a huge surprise, and we’re learning this after learning that Yuito’s family largely consists of assholes planning to burn up their own civilization as fuel just to stick it to moon men who may or may not even be alive anymore, so I’m not sure offing dad Sumeragi is actually that big a deal. It probably is for Yuito, but for the audience it’s a mild curiosity as to which of Kagero’s many possible motives was his motive, as well as his motive for revealing things now, rather than actually being a problem.
The episode leaves us there, with any fallout from the reveal put off for next time.
Honestly, against my better judgment, I find myself slowly getting more invested in Scarlet Nexus. It’s a mediocre show, there’s no two ways about that, but it’s at least started giving us enough pieces and maintaining enough of a flow to care a little about what happens and what these characters are thinking. This is a basic, fundamental need for a story to work, but it’s not something I was expecting out of Scarlet Nexus after it got going, and yet the second half has gone ahead and provided. I will never love this show, I will not forgive that it gave us an entire season worth of lame episodes with insanely repetitive pacing, and I will not praise or really recommend it unless the kind of exceptional effort that would be needed for such an exceptional result magically manifests against even newer expectations as to the show’s content and quality… but I might be able to part with it on somewhat better turns if it keeps itself at more of this level rather than backsliding.