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© Rumiko Takahashi・Shogakukan／Urusei Yatsura Anime Production Committee
This episode makes me more curious about the forum discussions than the episode itself. The idea of the multi-verses and branching timelines is, unfortunately, one of the most played-out story tropes in the past couple of years. While we got an explanation for the future we saw last week regarding Shinobu, this episode boils down to the fact that there are multiple possible scenarios for the future, and we only got a glimpse into one of them. However, none of this feels like it matters because anyone watching this show knows that the future we see in this episode can’t and probably won’t happen, given the social dynamics of everybody in the current timeline that we’re watching. It was interesting looking into it a little bit last week and realizing that the reason why Shinobu was given focus is that this was based on a chapter that was written very early on in the franchise before Shinobu was written off in exchange for pairing Ataru and Lum due to the latter’s popularity. It’s fun looking at these alternate futures as potential endings for where the series could’ve gone if characters were received differently.
My favorite joke in the episode is the game of spot-the-difference, where it just became a case of “Hey, look at this,” and most of it wasn’t very funny. There is also the introduction of a new character named Inaba, responsible for progressing this plot. I laughed when he tried to downplay seemingly how severe everything was. His gimmick seems to be that he is a loser who keeps messing up, but the downside is that he doesn’t have a lot of presence. When the show is trying to ship him with Shinobu, a character who has barely been relevant in the show for dozens of episodes, I rolled my eyes because it’s not interesting.
A lot of the characters in the show can be boiled down to one gimmick or archetype, and maybe this is the writers’ way of giving Shinobu some additional layers with a potential happy ending, given the fact that she got very shafted when the story decided to shift focus away from her. The series could redeem the storyline in the next episode as an additional part will be airing next week, making this one of the longest story arcs in this reboot. I hope that it ends as interestingly as it started.
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