Boku Dake ga Inai Machi 8 starts with a bit of terror, and a conundrum. The killer enters the bus. Kayo is too terrified to escape, but all the killer does is kick a box, dumps a backpack full of incriminating things … and leaves without opening the curtain. The only thing I can think of is that he intended for the items to be found, a lure for Satoru, perhaps. It’s almost as if the killer knows about Satoru’s ability and past and is messing with him somehow. After that, the kids wisely decide to move Kayo elsewhere, and we’re reminded that only Satoru knows about the murders-to-be. The others simply think they’re helping out a classmate in trouble.
So no terror this week, though the happiness that comes later feels like we’re being set up for it. Satoru decides on plan B, basically take Kayo to his mom. He knows she knows pretty much everything–even if he’s 29 he’s something of a guileless one, and now he’s in a 10 year-old body and it’s his mom we’re talking about. Anyway, he guesses right, and we get a sweet sequence of events where Kayo, maybe for the first time in her life, is, er, mothered. A hand is raised, Kayo expects a hit, and instead gets a pat on the head. A bath with tickling, a night light, a delicious breakfast. It was hard not to get emotional when it got too much for her. As for the terror, maybe next week, but first we have a confrontation to deal with.
Musaigen no Phantom World 8 … do I really have to? Not only do we get ridiculous fanservice, we get unexplained moments like why the hell Haruchiko was the one painting Mai’s butt, or what happened to the other students in what started as a school-wide event of taking down the monkey, and why sneaking up to it in a horse costume was ever considered to be a good idea. Even Cthulu was lame. And explaining it away as using Abramelin’s finger, as described in scene one is technically dramatically okay but a cheap way out. Well, the little monkeys were cute.
Shoujo-Tachi wa Kouya wo Mezasu 8 has Bunta in a dull writers-lockdown episode. The usual: he complains, tries to escape a couple times, buckles down and makes the deadline. Nothing in it works terribly well, and I’m trying to figure out why. Maybe it’s that we don’t know enough about the script, the problems with it, or even the deadline. It’s all vague. And if he does rush and finish it won’t the others have to proofread and complain about it and lock him down again? If we knew the exact starting and finishing times were, or how much he had to go, I would have felt more excited, and “You have to write 66 bytes a second” doesn’t help, it just makes things seem hopeless. Well, it’s done. Next week I guess it will be pressure on Yuuka for a change.
Nurse WItch Komugi-chan R 7 brings us very little. Kokona thinks she needs a gimmick to advance to advance as an idol and so tries a lot of stupid ones, only to be told by Tsukasa and Kokona (early in the episode) that the best trait for her would come from her natural strengths, and those are her dedication and work ethic, pretty dull traits for an idol, I would say. She should have stuck with the belly button. Or she could use her magical-girl sadism; that would work too. The show throws us just enough goofiness (see screenshot above) to keep it from being a total loss.
Too Old for Anime 