Anticlimax time!
There’s no final boss for you.
Karen deleted.
On paper this is a fine resolution to the problems the show faces, but in practice, it’s kind of insulting. Fubuki shows up at the boss fight with Karen to talk Karen out of having a boss fight at all. He’s successful. Yuito collapses. Much of the drama in this show is born from Yuito randomly collapsing. They all end up at the hospital with the world being quiet (too quiet) after another Kunad Gate spasm.
There, the plan is very quickly hatched to not just destroy the Kunad Gate but the Extinction Belt as well. Instead of burning out the brains of every citizen of the nation, they’ll just wire the top psi users into the supercomputer for the necessary power boost to move the belt, slam dunk it into their private black hole, and then close the gate as was previously the idea. So really, we’re saving the world as an afterthought here.
And, with Karen on board and a brief concern about Yuito’s health (because Hanabi wanted more lines, I presume), we do just that, getting everyone on the highway to glow colors and yell as the swirly sky effect goes down the hole. To add in a little drama, Yuito collapses halfway through, but the NPCs handle the Others that result and he recovers fairly quickly to finish the job on the Extinction Belt. That means it’s time to go do the time puzzles again with Karen, and everything will be fine.
Karen decides he hasn’t been enough of a prima donna, though, and zaps Yuito and Kasane before taking a time travel trip himself, saying he hasn’t given up on hope (possibly because of a weird vision of young Alice atop a gray mountain of dead Karens and Others both he and Yuito see at points in this episode) and has one more trip in him to make everything right. He vanishes, there’s some extra wide red strings nonsense, and I guess that worked out because Kunad Gate goes away leaving earth with clear skies.
Oh, and Alice is alive now. Neither she nor anyone else knows what happened to Karen. In fact, Alice (and anyone who wasn’t a part of the Yuito-and-friends-save-the-world ritual) doesn’t even know who Karen is, suggesting that he was finally successful at changing time by erasing himself from reality. Somehow. I don’t know if he just murdered his little kid self or did something more esoteric, but he’s both gone and forgotten while his main objective is accomplished. No word on whether this saved Naomi and/or Nagi en passant – theoretically it should have at least cleared Naomi since the weaponized Other research that got her sniped was started thanks to Alice being transformed in the first place, but we don’t see either of them so maybe of the three notable dead people it’s just Alice who gets a second chance.
We’ve got one more episode, but at this point it seems like it’s just going to be denouement. No time-lost computer mind with all the partial red string users past including the mom character as a surprise final boss (though to be fair, the BABE Crimson King being a no-show is less of a letdown than the actual Crimson King), no moon armada or anything just to give us a climax, nothing seems to be liable to show itself.
And alright, this is a decent wrap for Karen’s arc, which when he was the main antagonist for the show minus random intrusions from Togetsu and Yuito’s brother is a good thing to wrap up, but it really is nothing for Yuito or Kasane. In the end, it was Fubuki, who hadn’t really grown or changed, who talked Karen into doing the right thing, and Karen who resolved all the major issues; Kasane and Yuito were total accessories. Isn’t this based on a video game? I’ve enjoyed games where you beat the final boss by talking before. Planescape: Torment is one of the best games of all time and you can resolve the final confrontation via dialogue options. But when you talk the boss to death and then do esoteric magic things to resolve the plot there, it’s the culmination of the main character’s journey, predicated entirely on the game you’ve played up to that point, and comes at the end of a long and harrowing run through the appropriately dramatic final area. In Scarlet Nexus, at least the anime version, the Sumeragi Crypt wasn’t really that awesome, and it’s not even actually the final area because we have hospital downtime before going back to the highway where we’ve been at least twice to cutscene our problems away.
I may have to play the game just to see how they handle this mess without breaking the implicit game-player compact. But more immediately, it’s a wait until next week and how they squander their last half hour of screen time in the world Karen made.