I continue to find this season of To Your Eternity better on the whole than I expected. It’s just an odd sock in every way, this show. The pacing never seems to conform to recognizable norms, the tone is all over the place, and a good many of the characters are frankly unlikeable. Yet somehow it works a lot of the time – maybe not in spite of those things but because of them. Not all the time, mind you – we’ve obviously had our fair share of stinker episodes. But enough of the time to be surprising.
As usual, this episode was all over the map. On the whole though the vibe is that we’re basically watching a magical realisn school life series now. We’ve certainly never had humor be as large a part of the total picture as it is – not for this long. And that’s with some pretty serious business going on. The matter of Mizuha’s mother continues to be a puzzler. The only explanation that seems to make sense given the existing mythology is that the imposter is a nokker (though Fushi suspects CG). And indeed, we meet at least one (Funa, the track girl) and maybe two characters who could be as well. Fushi and the Man in Black are certain all the nokkers are eliminated – but he hasn’t been answering his messages lately, so who knows what’s going on there.
Even with that going on, the Fushigumi going to school is the basic theme of the episode. Gugu is in high school, where he says nobody asked him about the mask (which is hard to believe). Gramps is recommending home schooling for March and Eko. And the big dog is going to junior high (along with Tonari) – class 2-1 to be precise. Even though no one outside the occult nee handicrafts club knows his true nature Fushi is pretty damn exotic anyway, with his white hair and ignorance of things like mechanical pencils. He becomes quite a sensation, which makes his close relationship with Mizuha grist for the mill of the girls who despise her as a bitch (which is basically the Japanese equivalent of a slut).
With Bon posing as a janitor to keep an eye on them Fushi and Tonari go through their paces. Mizuha continues to get creepier every week. And while she has a ways to go to catch up to her ancestor, I’m starting to really dislike her. Fushi is way too dense to pick up the anvil hints she’s dropping, but her bloodline isn’t the sort to give up on their obsessions. Tonari is another character I’ve historically found very annoying, but she is right about one thing – it would certainly be no surprise if Mizuha decided to shank Fushi.
You have to feel for Yuki, having a thing for her. Mizuha has no time for him of course, but given that they’re basically in the same boat romantically she does sort of understand him at least. I don’t think anything with Mizuha is going to end well because when her clan is involved pretty much nothing ever does. But if there are indeed nokkers in the modern world Fushi has bigger problems than her to worry about…
