Time is a flat circle.
This episode sees the reveal, via a brain dive at least, that the guy who obviously seemed like the copycat, since he had the digital duplicate that called the police and a solid motive to try to reignite the Nightmare investigation was, in fact, the copycat.
He is also dead, with the real Nightmare evidently taking umbrage at the imitation, identifying who did it faster than the actual cops, and cutting him down to size. Awkward. Shortly thereafter, one of Harold’s old family disappears, and it’s suspected that he might once again be in the Nightmare’s clutches.
As they search for him, Echika and Harold split up. Because that hasn’t gone wrong in literally every mystery or horror story ever told including just about every previous arc of Your Forma. While split up, Echika gets a call purporting to be from Bigga about a lead on the Nightmare’s location, directing her somewhere specific. She sends a generic message over to Harold, who tears off after her with his old cop buddy since he remembers Echika sucks and believes that she has become the Nightmare’s next target.
All of this leaves out a surprising amount of fairly legitimate emotional work with these characters. Like the last one, this is a good episode. Not only do I have suspicions about the Nightmare (rather than an obvious “he did it” The Nightmare’s seeming ability to manipulate people in law enforcement and access to intel would normally suggest an insider, but fiction often lets baddies just know and/or achieve things off screen) but I actually feel like they’re doing something with Harold and Echika. Echika wants to keep Harold away from this case, because she knows the Laws of Respect are more guidelines than actual rules but that everything Harold has would be destroyed if he broke them. Harold wants to keep Echika away because, surprise surprise, she could be targeted just like his former partner, and he wants to stay involved in the case because bringing the Nightmare to justice is something that has actual meaning for him.
Does their fight go on a little long for how quickly it’s resolved? Maybe, but it’s not criminally so even if you think it does, and it is at least some other movement, displaying without hammering in the facts that Echika has begun to see Harold more as a human than as a machine and that, for better or worse, she might be right about that. Other than that Echika is of course not going to get chainsawed to death, I don’t actually know for certain how the final act is going to go.
Hopefully, better than the bland summation-confrontations at the end of the first two acts, but we’ll have the answer next week.