Administrative Note: As I mentioned before, I’m going to be travelling for the next two weeks. So I won’t be updating with new episodes. I’ll try to play catch up when I get back. However, I have prepared a series of less timely posts for while I’m gone, about one a day. So the site will end up being updated more than when I’m here.

I’ve been ripping on this show a lot, but I actually liked this episode. A big part of that was that it had no Shakespeare quotes.

The whole time Yoshino was giving his speech, I was thinking “this is totally BS! I can’t believe this speech would convince anyone!”

And then it didn’t end up convincing anyone. The characters don’t act like morons, which it seemed like they were being set up to do. Samon said exactly what I was thinking, and Mahiro agrees with him.

And as I was watching and thinking, I came up with this theory: what if Hakaze hadn’t traveled through time? What if she’d just been unconscious for exactly two years? Given the presence of magic in this world, it didn’t seem too infeasible. Much less ridiculous than time travel, at the very least.

It turned out that my theory was right! Yoshino proposed the same thing, and Samon had no rebuttal. Ha! I solved the mystery! I’m a genius, I thought to myself.

But then it turned out that Yoshino’s theory wasn’t true. Yoshino didn’t even believe it himself. In retrospect, I have to wonder if the show goaded me into making this guess, even before Yoshino explicitly said it. Did they present just the right clues at just the right time to guide my mind down this chain of thoughts? If so, brilliantly done. Regardless of whether it was intentional or not, the way the unraveling of the mystery matched my own thought process made the episode seem uncannily perceptive.

Samon finally finds a way to prove that Hakaze is from the past— by having her write a message on the barrel. I think I was supposed to get something out of this message— who is Ariel? They haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m pretty sure this message will lay the grounds for Samon’s defeat (combined with the fact that Hakaze hasn’t given up hope). Samon doesn’t seem to realize it, but he just proved that they can still change the past. Which means they can prevent Hakaze from dying.

A couple final thoughts: why does it take longer for fighter jets to arrive than it takes tanks? And damn, Samon has an awful poker face.