ERASED

Episode 11

This week's ERASED started right where the last one left off as far as storytelling goes. Apparently not yet confident in his position as a cartoonishly evil villain, Mr. Yashiro opened this episode with a monologue about a childhood spent drowning hamsters to death. That ridiculous memory, coupled with the episode's choice to literally erase Satoru from the opening song (I guessed it!), had me fairly worried we would be double-dipping on ludicrous thriller shenanigans.

Fortunately, most of the rest of this episode was quite good! Satoru wasn't actually ERASED, as it turns out - instead, his near-death experience left him stuck in a coma for fifteen years, and ultimately traveling back to the present day on the long route. Finding himself in an adult body, the show made the clever choice of switching Satoru's internal and external voices, so the trials of his adult self were narrated by the child he'd recently left. Amnesia is normally a pretty cheap device, but here, Satoru's confusion made a lot of sense. He'd already been having trouble mixing his childhood and adult feelings back during his Revival trip, and so a series of scarring memories and fifteen years of being in a coma would understandably leave his identity a little muddled.

On top of that, the many quiet scenes of Satoru slowly being reacquainted with his friends and family were all very pleasant and emotionally grounded. Satoru's scenes with his mother have always been some of the show's best, and that remained true here. And the scene where Satoru met an adult Hinazuki, who'd been given a chance to start her own family, felt like a proper ending to this show's most effective emotional thread. Even Satoru's new friendship with a young leukemia patient felt like a smart continuation of the show's ideas - Satoru's consistently framed himself as a hero, but the idea of a child hunting down a serial killer has always been a major (and ultimately catastrophic) act of hubris on his part. The small human heroism of inspiring another patient with your courage seems like a much more fitting “victory” for Satoru's self-image.

Of course, Mr. Yashiro is still out there in this timeline, gathering power and saving up evil grins and waiting for his moment to strike. But even Yashiro's material was handled far better in this episode than the last. There were some occasional dramatic overreaches (like the terrified birds taking flight at his name, for instance), but Yashiro's menace was largely conveyed through more subtle means. There were lots of shots that consistently cut off his eyes, as well as a nice sequence of him peeling an apple that echoed the knife at Yuuki's house. The episode's final scene certainly implied the show will have a fairly bombastic conclusion, but the leadup there was strong as well; I particularly liked the detail of Yashiro's gloves drumming on Satoru's wheelchair, an implication of relative power that also echoed the previous episode.

This was a much better episode than last week's, and also one that solidified some of my thoughts on the show's overall construction. In short, I don't think this show needed a serial killer. Virtually every scene that has either been designed to frame Mr. Yashiro as a killer or actually demonstrate his “true nature” has been one of the show's weakest, a divergence from strong character drama into hammy genre fare. When the show moved back to the present time, and put Satoru on the run against a killer in a position of power, it became a garden-variety thriller. All of the show's best material has been its more humane stuff - there have certainly been scenes with Hinazuki's mother that echo the show's general issues of clumsy, over-the-top framing, but Hinazuki's narrative has also contained virtually every single great scene in the series. This plot doesn't need a killer; in fact, if you remove the killer, the fact that a sequence of child deaths made the community assume there was a killer actually works far better at illustrating the show's general condemnation of communal distrust. ERASED is a pretty questionable thriller, but it's a sound human story with a wide variety of atmospheric and emotionally charged highlights. Remove the one from the other, and you actually have a great show.

Overall: B

ERASED is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.