In which Echika actually does something she intended to do in a crisis.
Compared to the other arc-end episodes, this one has fairly little in terms of summation. Instead we get a drawn-out verbal battle of ethics between Echika and Harold, which earns us our RDA of retreading important plot points. No phase of the argument is particularly great, though there is a good moment when Echika admits that she values Harold as a person and not just a partner.
In the middle of this, Echika actually takes a shot, hitting Harold in the arm to prevent him from making with the saw work. I thought that maybe she was going to headshot the Nightmare to remove the ability of Harold to take vengeance, and given her track record in this show maybe that’s where she was aiming, but in her defense she does achieve her main goal through the shot as it happens, resulting in a brief grapple with Harold and talking him down. With the Nightmare in no state to give his own account of events, this will once more be swept under the rug by Echika.
In the wake of this, we get probably the show’s best and most protracted Brain Dive scene, of the dying Nightmare of Petersburg, in which we learn that he’s about as insane as we expected, and that he wasn’t responsible for offing Harold’s former partner. That was a different copycat, a fact that frustrated the “real” killer to no end. That means even though Harold is largely able to make peace with the past – getting a decent reputation with the previously angry old lady, having a nice scene with his owner/“sister in law” type person (the partner’s widow), and even wearing the new scarf from Bigga much to Bigga’s blushy pleasure – his true nemesis is still out there somewhere.
Speaking of things that are still out there somewhere, we spend a fair chunk of this episode’s tail on an unrelated plot element, where the Amicus husband/assistant of the woman in charge of the company that makes digital clones is found to have been… pushed beyond spec, which is tracked back to the same group behind the source code that was worked into E, with an unknown number of other Amicus the world over possibly having been given enhanced independence.
And with a clear “Adventure continues” vibe, that’s the end of Your Forma. I… can’t recommend it.
It’s a real shame. There is a decent core here. The world seems like it has a lot of background work in its building, the characters aren’t awful, and the mysteries have solid backbones even if I’ve groused about them. The problems are pretty big, but they’re mostly in the execution and pacing. Even moreso than usual I feel like I can’t comment on the source material, but whether the original Light Novels are better or not they didn’t translate well to the screen. Whether they could or they couldn’t, they didn’t.
The first arc had at least a couple good episodes, and the third was mostly better, but the second arc had more constructive issues that burned goodwill and all of them ended weak, the first two with overcooked summations and the final arc with a long and kind of random tail.
It hurts, but my letter grade for Your Forma is a D+. As much as there is material that works, there’s more that doesn’t and a lot of the weaker stuff is critically placed. Stick with Psycho-Pass or ID:Invaded.