It all means nothing
This episode’s a smoke screen
Think we won’t notice?
Did you want to see an esoteric mess that does very little to advance the story or the characters but looks either kind of cool or very stupid depending on how you look at it? Hopefully, you answered “no!”. Well, too bad, that’s what we’ve got.
Karen emerges from the crypt, talks like he’s stoned, and is then confronted by another version of himself who failed to time travel like the thousands of copies of him before. New Karen steals old Karen’s memory and identity, including the fact that his brain is integrated into the supercomputer of Suoh. Karen (the remaining Karen) then goes a little insane, seeing countless of himself and turning into a barrage of long-haired war-painted versions of himself which look kind of cool in one or two shots but really dopey in others. I know he’s supposed to come off as some kind of ancient samurai, but more often he looks like Sephiroth got into mom’s makeup kit and made a mess with the lipstick.
In this form, he tries to break Yuito and Kasane by showing them visions of Nagi and Naomi, attempting to tempt them to use the power of the Red Strings to fix time, just like he’s been failing to do for countless loops. They resist the temptation (very easily since we already saw them overcome the general idea) and turn the process back around on Karen, using the supercomputer’s surveillance memory to show him a time when Alice wished that he would be happy and not worry about her. This at first seems to take Karen out – he goes back to his normal appearance and starts having a very quiet freakout for a little bit – but he soon rebounds, refusing to accept fate, and attacks to steal Yuito’s Red Strings (again).
It’s completely crazy, but then Karen’s been coming off as completely crazy, so I’m sort of willing to accept that he hasn’t gotten the memo that despite going back in time thousands of times with obscene resources he’s never changed a bloody thing. It’s honestly astounding how non-lucid he is for someone still pulling this crap off, and how phenomenally ineffectual it’s indicated that he’s been at altering time. At least other time loopers who either had trouble reaching or couldn’t reach their ultimate goal, like Homura Akemi and Okarin, had some different loops or incremental progress to show for their trouble. Karen has, apparently, been sticking 100% to the script and has gone completely coo-coo for coco puffs because of it. How is it that with 2000 years to plan and countless loops with the brain of a supercomputer unbound by time, you both can’t move events an inch and can’t figure out that either you’re an idiot or time just doesn’t work that way? Even Yuno Gasai was more self aware about her situation, and she’s known pretty much just for being a complete nutjob.
And thus, we end with everybody working together to try to squash him, a cutscene sort of attack he teleports out of for the obvious transition to a boss fight. A boss fight that we will not see until next week because the show burned an entire episode on Major General Karen’s Wild-Yet-Somehow-Implausibly-Tame Ride. At this point, I’m wondering if we’re actually going to get a follow-up to BABE. It did really look like the mind of the computer was escaping with Red Strings power when it so conveniently shut itself off on being approached, but that possibility has never been mentioned since and we’re running out of time to send in the clowns.