Computer turns off
Let’s just go to the past now
Oh look, mom is back!
So, this week on Scarlet Nexus we start by giving the finger to the holographic projection of Yuito and Kasane’s mother produced by BABE, with both our protagonists rebuffing the computer’s effort to imitate someone they cared about in order to manipulate them. Actually, I kind of like this, because the hologram is the kind of stupid trap that heroes in shows usually just go ahead and fall for, so it’s noce to see it get a total no-sell. Nice enough to justify the moment? Maybe not.
Babe responds by making the floor slowly collapse behind them as they run onward towards the core. This takes them through an area that looks, like the center of the Suoh supercomputer, like a massive and gorgeous outdoor boss arena for no apparent reason, this time with an actual boss monster, a giant serpentine flying other, hanging about.
The party doesn’t fight the boss. They don’t even engage it. They just run down a bridge that gradually collapses from the direction they came to try to drop them into a bottomless pit. They even pause the collapse to rescue their members who fall a little behind, so I’m not sure how much of a threat this was actually supposed to be. Seriously, this is the strategy of a sentient supercomputer? Higgins, GLaDoS, and Hal 9000 are rolling in their digital graves.
As if to reassure you that this is all pointless, Babe doesn’t even manage to close its own doors in time and when our team hacker steps up to do her thing, just goes ahead and shuts itself down. Granted, that’s not without an obvious flag for the audience – the brief manifestation of some crimson king sort of entity – that it isn’t as over with no contest as the characters believe.
The characters themselves do see one problem, though: with BABE totally scrubbed, they have no leads on Kunad Gate and the Red Strings. But that’s okay, because they remember that they have the power of time travel!
Yeah, Kasane and Yuito have been together for how many episodes now, and are only just thinking of using that to solve their problems? I get it, using the Red Strings puts a huge strain on Yuito in particular, making it less than an ideal first choice, but with how quickly and shockingly casually they bring it up now you’d think that maybe something else like Major General Karen’s Wild Ride or the tragedies that our leads would themselves like to correct would at least have prompted a discussion of the possibility.
In any case the decision is made to sent Kasane back in time to talk to somebody who would be knowledgeable about the Red Strings: her and Yuito’s mother. They send her to the day that the Others attacked and Yuito had that memory of being saved by a suspiciously Kasane-shaped figure, which is also the last time Yuito saw their mom.
Speaking of that whole ‘their mom’ thing, the timeline doesn’t quite add up to me – Kasane was walking, talking, and exercising her psychic powers when she was cut off from her mom, who then fled to Suoh. If she’s really Yuito’s mom (and there has been no indication that she’s not his biological mother), he would have been conceived after that, unless mom had far bigger secrets to worry about. So Kasane should be at least several years older than Yuito, but other evidence doesn’t bear that out.
We’ll see if this is still an error at the end.
Kasane’s mission also goes relatively smoothly. She makes contact with mom, who already knows a lot about her because apparently BABE is tied into every brain that has ever held the imperfect Red Strings power that Kasane and Yuito represent the perfection of, letting it send information back in time as visions to those individuals, mom here included. The Others arrive right on schedule, and Kasane rescues Yuito before meeting back up with mother, who requests to return with her to our present tense, rather than just telling her things there in the past. So, back to the future they go, and the episode ends.
Before I let it go, a word on time travel. In this episode, it seems that San Dimas time is in effect. For those who don’t know, San Dimas Time refers to a device in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” where the main characters, though able to time travel, are told that “the clock in San Dimas is always running” – meaning (in theory) that the time traveler will always “return” with an amount of time having passed when they left equivalent to the time they spent elsewhen. This makes sense in, say, Noein, where the “time travel” is actually more like dimension travel, so it makes sense to have “home” still moving forward. It’s perfectly valid in other circumstances too, just as long as you’re consistent with it.
The thing is, Scarlet Nexus did not actually do any work to establish San Dimas Time. Instead, the show relies on implying it by, during Kasane’s excursion, cutting back to an out-of-commission Yuito (With Hanabi still playing, according to the direction, the subtext girlfriend role. No I will not let that go; if Hanabi is best girl give her enough screen time to be understood as such!). We don;t know if we should be worried about how long Kasane is spending in the past, so it starts to crumble if you think about it too much. This is a frequent problem with time travel that’s not amazingly well thought out, especially free-movement time travel like the Red Strings rather than restricted forms like time loops or time leaps that have clear and consistent rules, and it’s starting to really bite Scarlet Nexus in the rear. It’s boring.
All in all, the show is getting… shockingly dull. The episodes are better constructed than they were in the first act, but there’s no investment and little if any drama, so the goodwill that was built in the turnaround is wearing thin. I said two weeks ago that I was starting to feel more invested against my better judgment, but it’s turned out that judgment was right and investment was a flash in the pan.
There’s still a chance, however small, that this poor show manages to stick the landing… but it’s not looking good, caring so little going into what should be the last acts where everything is big and impactful.