Family is happy
For a quiet episode
Say goodbye to mom
So, we start off this episode with… cooking! Yay! Yuito, Kasane, and their mom actually get a little while at one of the shelters to act as a family, which I have to admit is more than I was expecting from this show in terms of moments that have emotional play. After that, it turns out the two of them have some work to do in order to seal the Kunad Gate. They have to go to the weird red strings space we saw before (called Chronos Terminal now) in order to untangle strings that have been afflicted by time travel. This involves what’s obviously the part of the game where you have to do some obnoxious puzzles in order to distract you from the fact that you’re getting an exposition dump of cutscenes.
In a show, though? It does kind of work as a breather. Kasane and Yuito visit weird distorted time spaces and talk about their feelings as they slowly put the weird distortions back into place, reconstructing the bizarre and broken scenery they find. They do this first in the OSF hospital and then in the future, covering along the way their bond as siblings, their beliefs about meddling with time (namely that doing so would be wrong), and by implication the fact that Kasane’s encounter with Old Yuito has kind of traumatized her.
At the end, they don’t enter the third distortion; it starts freaking out after Karen is seen in it (indicating that he’s, you know, still causing problems) and Yuito and Kasane struggle hard to to fix this “last” distortion keeping the Kunad Gate open, returning to their time immediately when they do. The audience is allowed to see that another distortion was left unseen (or spawned in) but the characters don’t realize that.
Once they’re back on the highway, Mom says goodbye, revealing that she needs to return to her time and have her brain harvested by Togetsu in order to prevent a paradox and ensure that the Kunad Gate actually closes. Which, because everyone forgot Karen running around with copies of Kasane and Yuito’s powers, she goes ahead and does it, leaving one last farewell message for her kids.
In all of this, we are offered some assorted answers. Mom can just stay in the present (until she willingly goes back) because she has her own, albeit deeply flawed, Red Strings. Kasane and Yuito are the same age because Kasane spent time in cold sleep. You know, important basic stuff that we could probably guess but that’s better being spelled out because it has to do with speculative fiction elements that need to be explained. They don’t explain the San Dimas Time, but I’ll take what I can get.
And… that was a suitably competent episode. I swear, every time I’m ready to give up all hope on this show filtering out to even watchable status, it shows that someone along the line, whether in the game staff or the anime staff, did know how to write plot and character… they just don’t get to put it on the screen all that often.