What ho, time travel!
A history is explained
And then it happens.
We do at least see how Kasane got to the end of the last episode here: it turns out that she and her friends were taken to the future, where the ominous black portal in the sky, which is given the name Kunad Gate, dominates the area above and the city is in crumbled ruins. Karen pops in to copy Kasane’s powers and then vanishes with another pointlessly cryptic line, and then the party runs into old blind ronin Yuito.
Future Yuito, after the others disappear, explains the plot to Kasane, including how things came to be post-apocalyptic in fifty years. Apparently, after the attempted coup, Yuito was used as a fake hero for the nation while Kasane became a wanted fugitive. Over time, the Kunad Gate (a sort of black hole thing created by Kasane and Yuito’s resonance.) grew, to the point where now it threatens to consume the whole world. There was a fast way to destroy the gate: if Yuito dies, it goes away. However, he was convinced by his friends to seek another path, and by the time he wanted to change course rather than struggling to live, the gate had become large enough to self-sustain even without him. Thus, he gives Kasane the task to return to her present and kill his younger self in order to save the world and the future, additionally motivating her by saying that the government was behind experiments to turn humans into Others (as happened with Naomi) and that he became complicit in those experiments.
Future Yuito then goes and commits suicide by swarm of Others, and the raw shock works as the emotional catalyst to send Kasane back to the present. There, she ends up seeking out Yuito’s dad to learn more of the truth. She finds him already stabbed and dying, but does get that the government is complicit in the human-Other experiments. Then, per the end of last episode, young Yuito arrives and Kasane attacks him. She soon breaks off when Yuito’s team arrives, though, and flees into the night. As Yuito gets one last gasp out of his dad (“Watch your back, the nation wants you…”) Kasane reunites with her friends, and explains the whole mess. Karen then teleports himself in and either captures or recruits them, it’s not entirely clear which in part because Kasane herself is wavering between, presumably, not wanting to kill a friend who hasn’t done anything wrong yet and her knowledge of what will happen in the future if she doesn’t.
Yuito’s team gets the intel of Kasane & co being now involved with Karen, and Yuito’s big brother calls to say he’s going to need Yuito to be a hero. Thus, the episode ends.
As is fairly standard for Scarlet Nexus, not a lot is accomplished in this 20 minutes or so of screen time… but in this episode’s case I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. We do get answers that we needed to get, and the ending is very much an important break in terms of the action. Further, we are left with some interesting questions: How does the power to time travel (apparently predicated in gravity control, the true power both Kasane and Yuito possess that only looks like psychokinesis) actually work? Did the ruined future already account for Kasane’s trip to it? It seems like it might, since she’s only a top suspect in the death of Yuito’s father because she was there at the precise time she was there because of her foreknowledge. But if we’re dealing with a stable time loop scenario, is there a way to prevent Old Yuito’s doomed future?
All this and more… I don’t expect the answers to. I’d like them, if not soon than at least in the show, but I don’t expect it. What I do expect is that next week will pretty much cover how Yuito of all people is supposed to be set up as a nation-saving hero, and that at least is some small degree of interesting. We’ll be seeing you there.