Great misfortune, huh?
Standard training, deployment…
Ah, there we have it.
Pardon the return of the Haiku intros. This episode is the kind that goes by in a flash. We get some downtime with our four leads apparent (Yuito, Kasane, Nagi, and Naomi) run into each other visiting a shrine for some novelty fortunes. Everyone but Naomi draws “Great Misfortune”, so she ties their fortunes together with her “Great Fortune” below the ema board to spread the wealth, so to speak. During the encounter, Yuito tries to get across his suspicion that Kasane may be somehow related to the mysterious figure who saved him in the past, but Nagi’s interest in Naomi interrupts any answers or lack thereof.
After that, we get a training bout between their squads. Just before the bout, Naomi reveals to Kasane that she might be interested in Yuito, meaning that Kasane is resolved to test Yuito’s mettle, which she gets the chance to do mid-combat. Of course in the mean time Naomi squares off with Nagi for a friendly bout while team secondary characters actually handles the objective.
Yuito’s father gives him a call, promising to explain the truth about things like their family and his missing mother over dinner, but before we can get there the alarm sounds and our main character squads are called out to battle against the Others once again. The engagement is at least out of town, but the particular subway tunnel environment isn’t conducive to communication and there are a lot more enemies including a big one that looks like a slinky dog with doll arms and a sprinkler head for a face with a tree on its head. Again, the Others are at least weird. I hope we keep getting new models rather than just the couple we’ve seen.
During the battle, Nagi and Naomi get separated from the others. The team pulls them out, and after they do it seems like they have a little breathing room, but then Naomi gets one of her future visions, this one of Kasane on the ground dying. She pushes Kasane out of the way, but ends up taking the sniper bullet shot by one of those conspirators from last episode herself. There’s blood to be sure, but then she starts sprouting crystals as she moans in agony, ultimately being entombed in the growing crystalline mass, still alive and in pain, as the episode comes to an end. I’m not sure if they just killed her off, but I doubt it: if she was just going to die weird, she would have died… but that doesn’t mean she’s not being written out of the show. Frankly, I blame her being interested in Yuito when we know the weird bond with him is to Kasane.
So, what really happened? We got some action sequences which were at least okay, one (1) brief character scene at the shrine, the promise of some sort of exposition, and some horrible event to set us up for next episode. The scenes didn’t, for the most part, feel like they had much weight to them, which leads to the entire episode feeling like it’s not quite the 22-minute run time that it actually is, like we should have had some extra scene to lend some force or interest to the episode.
Well, all I can say for now is that there are worse crimes a show can commit. This episode was basically painless (except for Naomi I guess), so there’s still a fair chance that next episode could shape up with some actual answers or development.