In Which Tea Rex Watches Random Anime

Eleventh Episode Roundup


Another


The show opens the episode with a full-on monologue with a straight-on shot of young Curse Killer repeating what he said on the tape about killing the dead kid. I think that the writers think this is suspenseful? Or ominous? I’m not sure what they were going for, here, but the feeling I got was “yeah, duh.”


And then the feeling I had later was “Oh, I see. I get it. I get it now, writers. Sorry.” Because this episode was full on crazypants.


We start with poor, stupid Jock, who said one of the classmates is acting kind of weird (dark-haired glasses kid, of “I don’t give a shit what high school you want to go to” fame), then accuses him of being the ghoul, then straight up pushes him off a second story building.


Meanwhile, Wimp played the tape for the countermeasures committee, Aggressive Pigtails Chick says she remembers Creepy being in her class back in elementary school WITHOUT A GLASS EYE and thus it must be Creepy who’s the ghoul, come to their class “unwhole”. (twist! We all know APC is talking about Creepy’s Sekret Twin! WHOOOOOPS.)


CUT TO - Jock, Creepy and Main Dude heading outside to see it Glasses Kid is still alive, only to discover some other classmate stabbed the fuck up at the base of the stairs and whispering about the manager. Main Dude runs to the dining hall, and sees one of the managers literally pinned to the wall, and flames filling the hall.


And then he closes the door and walks off rather than pulling the fucking fire alarm – I mean, I guess there’s a lot to deal with? He and Creepy try to help out stabbed up classmate and tell Jock and Wimp, who’s joined this merry crew, to tell everyone to get the fuck out of the lodge of DOOOOM.


And here’s where it all goes batshit. Jock and Wimp run into Old Lady Death, one of the managers who I guess, apropos of being around the cursed class, decided it was time to lose her fucking mind and murder some folks, is wandering the halls of the lodge slicing up people who come her way. Like, say, Jock and Wimp, who fight her off for the rest of the episode.


Meanwhile, some Tall Glasses Chick who’s on the countermeasures committee has lost her fucking mind and decides it’s her job to kill Creepy and save the class. She plays the Curse Killer’s tape over the PA, announces that Creepy is the dead kid, and tells the class to get Creepy.


Like a zombie horde trying to avoid death by bringing it upon others, the class swarms Creepy with makeshift weaponry. Main Dude tries to pull a Jesus and is all “he whoever, cast the first stone, also, guys, the whole place is FUCKING ON FIRE,” but the class isn’t having it. One of the teachers also steps in, begging the students to think rationally and not attack one person out of fear and suspicion, but one of the kids breaks down and attacks Creepy. Teacher jumps in front of her and gets her head thwacked to death as a result, which breaks the whole Murder Mood with the students.


Bonding over this horrific death that occurred right before their eyes, Main Dude takes Creepy’s hand, they jump over the teacher’s body, and the run for it before the students recover their wits.

What follows is a sequence of students attempting to murder Creepy and dying horribly as a result (one falls out a window and breaks her neck on the concrete below, another is hung to death in agony as Creepy watches every last breath of her assailant with her typical blank look). There’s also just fucking chaos going on in the rest of the lodge, as Wimp and Jock try to escape from Old Lady Death and the students try to find Creepy and Main Dude.


Then we get this one little moment that made my dark heart smile and hug this show close. Two students milling around in front of the dining hall are casually discussing the chaos. “Oh, I guess maybe Creepy is the dead kid?” “I guess. Though Main Dude seems pretty relaxed about it. I dunno. Hey, do you smell smoke?” “Well, main dude said something about there being a fire or something? In the dining hall?” “Hunh. Maybe I should check it –“


*Opens doors*


*Backdraft CONSUMES HIM IN FIRE AND CAUSES A MASSIVE EXPLOSION THAT ROCKS THE LODGE ON ITS FOUNDATION*


As kid one’s limp, charred body collapses, kid two whimpers and runs away.


I laaaughed and laaaughed and laaaughed.


Anyway, by this point Creepy and Main Dude are in the basement and Crazy Glasses Chick attacks Dude to put him down and keep him from protecting Creepy. Then through a convoluted set of dodges and stabbity attacks, she tangles herself up and, as said above, hangs herself accidentally. It is lengthy and gross.


Aggressive Pigtails Chick catches this just as it goes down, and apparently, she and Glasses Chick were pals, because she starts crying and blaming Creepy for all these deaths. Which is actually a legitimate complaint because, remember, CREEPY HAS KNOWN WHO THE DEAD KID WAS SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE SERIES.


And then the saddest thing happens. Creepy says “if the dead person is sent back to death, all of this would stop, right?” And then runs away with a stabbin’ stick. Why is this sad? Because Creepy is gonna kill someone, and it’s not Pigtails.


PIGTAILS ISN’T THE DEAD KID.


I cannot fully express my disappointment here, guys.



Death Parade


Damn this show. It made me weep actual tears. There are two main storylines this episode that reflect both the way various arbiters judge and what exactly determines a “live well lived.”


Okay, so, Red is keeping his pet humans “alive” by casting people into the void who deserve it in their place and shoving their souls back in the new dummy bodies. He’s already determined that pop star has to go to the void, and Girl to a new life, but Girl is devoted to Pop Star and she refuses to leave the bar without him. He’s been holding off passing judgment on Pop Star until he can determine how to get Girl to her proper place, but time is running out and these people need to get the fuck out of Purgatory.


To fix this little conundrum, he offers to let Girl condemn a newly dead guy to the void so that Pop Star can stay in the bar a little longer. I believe he does this so that he can ultimately decide to cast Girl into the void without any guilt. But Girl just can’t press that button, and instead chooses to go to the void with Pop Star on her own volition.


This fucks up Red a bit – he thinks this is just about the stupidest thing someone can do, given that the void is a place where souls float, forever, consumed in their own darkest feelings and thoughts. But Girl tells him off, saying that she lived her life the way she wanted to live it, and will have her death the way she wants it too, thanks. And off she and Pop Star go, into the void. As the elevator lowers, faster and faster, the façade of humanity flakes away from her and Pop Star’s bodies, and as Pop Star’s eyes open, the bodies become dummies and their souls are cast off into darkness, circling each other before coming together, forever, avoiding the fate of the lonely souls drifting with them.


I broke the fuck down after watching this. There was something so terribly sad and noble about this girl sacrificing her ability to live again so that one lonely soul whom she worshipped from afar in life won’t be condemned to its awful fate of being Forever Alone. Seriously, I cannot believe that these two barely there, joke characters were given an ending so heart-wrenching and bittersweet and kind of perfect.


And Red, that bastard, also grew as a character. His whole MO is torturing humans until they either break down or overcome, then tossing them into elevators to their designated rebirth or void fates, then boredly doing it all again. With Girl, he faced someone who was so compassionate that she deserved reincarnation but chose to drift forever. And he allowed her to make her choice, against his better judgment – literally. And now he has to live with his choice – as much as he can live – and perhaps will see judgments differently in the future.


Aside from this B storyline, the bulk of the episode was devoted to Pale Man and Audience In. We see Audience In’s memories of when she first entered Purgatory, totally aware that she’s dead and thus not quite ready for judgment. Ageless Child Manager arranges to have her memories erased, and Pale Man specifically asks to judge her. Ageless Child Manager sees this as a prompt that his emotions are finally affecting his job for the better, and decides to let Audience In hang around for a while, supposedly so that Pale Man can grow as a person in her presence.


And the time for judgment has arrived. Pale Man gives Audience In an ice skating costume, and turns the bar into a rink. As Audience In skates, and we are shown that she is a skillful skater, we get a beautiful, quiet scene of her memories of her happy life coming back to her. The animation is quite good and incredibly fluid, and Pale Man makes the manikins clap for her.


And then in a flashback that gave me legitimate goosebumps, we see her happy life destroyed by a broken knee.
Audience In goes down, her performance cut off by this memory.

As she later explains, everyone cried for her, but she felt no emotion. Losing skating didn’t make her sad. What it did was make her realize that she didn’t really know anyone, and had never worked to know anyone, and nor did anyone know her, not truly. Her mother tells her that she’s grown into a lovely person, but she weeps and tells her mother that it isn’t true – Audience In doesn’t even know who SHE is. Her love of skating was a mask that kept her from reaching out to people or figuring out just who she should be.


When she lost skating, all that emptiness came to fore, and she committed suicide to escape. Now she thinks that no one should try to understand another person – that she killed herself for something that simply shouldn’t be.


But Pale Man disagrees. He wants to know of life, and of the people who live, and is glad to have met her. He believes trying to understand someone else isn’t the problem – it’s being too closed off, too above other people to try not to understand, too focused on “what’s the point of it all” that’s the problem. People need to live while they’re alive. After giving her a drink that puts her to sleep, he asks Ageless Child Manager if he can have Audience In’s memories so that he can finally properly judge her.


And finally, the episode ends with Pink Hair’d Grandpa confronting Ageless Child Manager about her actions.


I really cannot wait to see how Pale Man judges Audience In, and just what the fuck Hippy Grandpa is up to.


The Devil is a Part Timer


They all have to sell shit from Hawaii or whatever for their Landlord!


Ooosh, grim scene of Neighborly Assassin killing off people in the old world who defied the church. Gaaah, she had a rather unhappy life as an assassin for the Inquisition. Get to happy, get to happy –


YAY, we’re back with the demons, and I just realized that Loyal General spent the last half of the show totally ill, mostly on the toilet, and unable to act!


Ooosh, corrupt church shenanigans are going on back in the old world. And Neighborly Assassin is called on by an angel to do ‘good’. GET TO THE HAPPY SHOW -


No dice! High School girl thinks she’s been having FUN with these fucking demons and church officials from another world rather than FACING DEADLY DEATH ON A REGULAR BASIS!!


Hero brings Assassin to tears by showing that she will find a way to be good without killing ‘evil’ if ‘evil’ is doing good!


The chicken shop manager is actually an angel and his costume is HILARIOUS!


HERO AND HIGH SCHOOL GIRL IS ABDUCTED BY ANGEL, AND SATAN IS OFF TO THE RESCUE!


Erased


Well, Satoru’s story has gone off in a completely different direction than I assumed it was going. I’m pleasantly surprised.


After a cold open with the Teacher’s voice explaining about how he murdered hamsters as a child and loves offering his victims “spiderweb threads” to help escape their fate (a reference to this short story), we find out that Satoru did not die in the river, and teacher has been keeping tabs on him. Legit chills of disgust.


We then have a scene of Satoru’s mother living her life, alone. Mom makes dinner alone, goes to market and museums alone, and eats ice cream alone. The calendar on her wall says 2003 – fifteen years since Satoru was in elementary school, three years before the beginning of Satoru’s original timeline. And then the other shoe drops – in her bedroom is a hospital bed, where Satoru lays, in a coma.

And he has finally woken up. As he blearily blinks his eyes, his mother smiles while crying and tells him good morning. We find out, too, that his mother has been working his body daily to keep it from atrophying, and keeping him well cleaned and regularly turned to keep bed sores from forming, all by herself and all in the belief that someday he would wake up.


Now here’s my plea that any of you with a mother or a figure as close to you as this fictional character who would love you unconditionally and would do everything for you to have the very best chances at survival, GO CALL THEM. NOW. Christ, I feel guilty for not being on the phone with my mother as I write this.


Now here’s a cool choice by the writers – Satoru’s memory is all fucked up from the brain injury that drove him originally into the coma. He doesn’t remember anything about the day that he was purposefully drowned, and most importantly he doesn’t remember that he was an adult on a completely different timeline than he’s currently living. To drive home this problem, all of the inner dialog is in Child Satoru’s voice because for all intents and purposes, that’s who he currently is.


Child Satoru is no dummy. He knows he became true friends with his friends, and that he befriended and helped Kayo, but he doesn’t quite recall what prompted these choices. He knows how to read all the kanji in his comic, and doesn’t know when that could have possibly occurred. He feels weirdly like he knows this era, and doesn’t understand why. He asks – “who am I?”


Meanwhile, his old friends Kenya and Hiromi visit him as adults. They’ve all grown up into wonderful people with jobs and lives, and the most delightful thing is that Kayo married Hiromi! Two people, whose lives were cut short in the original timeline, came together and made a happy life with each other. They even had a baby, whom they named “future” to celebrate what Kayo believes is the future she would not have had without Satoru’s help – which is truer than she can possibly know.


She does admit that she and Hiromi often felt guilty that they could go on and be happy while Satoru was stuck in a coma, but Satoru, who has frankly become at the end of this show a truly selfless, happy person, his soul much healthier than when we first met him, tells her that the fact that he had any sort of role in his friends’ happiness is all he needs.


I cried again, guys. These shows are going to fucking kill me with the feels.


Then something Kayo says seems to trigger Satoru – about the past, and how much Satoru helped. He slumps, and she apologizes for overtiring him.


While the show plays coy, I believe that’s when Satoru got his memories back. The very next scene we see him skillfully drawing a picture of Kayo and her baby, which he quickly hides from his mom as Young Satoru certainly can’t draw like that. And when the doctor comes to assess his recovery, he asks for more time in rehab to hasten his recovery. We also no longer hear his inner monologue.


Then the story picks up the pace. Satoru befriends a lonely little cancer patient girl, who we discover THE TEACHER HAS BEFRIENDED.


See, the teacher has been told that Satoru’s memories are all jumbled, and apparently he’s been keeping tabs on Satoru. He’s now a member of the city council, so he has an in at the hospital whenever he wants to come by. He plays nice with Satoru, carving up an apple for him in a scene that made me very tense as I was waiting for the teacher to fucking slice him up. We get a montage of Satoru’s physical therapy, and Satoru, Cancer Girl and Teacher paling it up in the gardens and community rooms of the hospital.


It made me sick in the stomach to watch this guy wandering around Satoru’s life. And if Satoru did indeed already have his memories, that was quite a long game to play on the Teacher.
For you see, the episode ends with the teacher offering to take Satoru up to the roof for a little “fun”, rolling him away from Cancer Girl’s room after a very suspicious visit. And as he brings him to the roof in the wheelchair, the Teacher starts saying cryptic things again, stupid, asshole murder things, which makes Satoru’s whole demeanor change.


Apparently Satoru is finished with Teacher’s bullshit, because he cuts off Teacher in mid monologue and says “I have my memories back.”


Cliff. Hanger. Y’all. I have no fucking clue what Satoru is up to.


Eleventh Episodes - COMPLETE