Sagrada Reset

Episode 10

So Kei brought his girlfriend back to life. These last few arcs were mostly him acquiring the powers that would let him do that: Haruki's reset, Murase's physical invulnerability to resets, Sasano's photographic memory capture, and some random dude's ability to transfer abilities. (He showed up in the first episode for like a minute, so please don't make me try to remember anything about him.) The plan is to go into the photo with Sumire and use a combination of Haruki's, Murase's, and the random guy's abilities to pull photo-Sumire out of there. This scenario has all sorts of bizarre existential implications, but it seems to go as intended – giving us Sumire (or a version of her) back in the world of the living. Finally, Kei and Sumire sit down to have a much-needed chat.

Disappointingly, Sumire's return doesn't come with much in terms of concrete revelations. It's confirmed that she does have future-sight and made arrangements for her revival in advance. However, she refused to tell Kei why she killed herself in the first place. I'm sure the explanation to that will unfold over the course of whatever drama is about to unfold from Kei bringing a person back to life, something the Bureau will have a few words to say about. Kei does bring up some of the crazy questions raised by this whole thing, like “is photo-Sumire the same Sumire who died or some sort of weird memory clone? Between Sumire's future sight and Haruki's reset abilities, does free will exist? Is it right to bring the dead back to life? Do we care about any of this?” However, these inquiries are immediately shut down by his unflappably rational demeanor. It's a shame, because some of them might have been interesting.

Sumire's responses, meanwhile, raise some red flags about her plans. Since she can see the future, she's presumably bored by everything and gets her kicks by directing reality to tell a story that she finds interesting. Well, that's not creepy at all. My suspicion is that Sumire is shaping up to be a villain, and if that turns out to be her motivation, it'd actually be kind of interesting. Unfortunately, this potentially interesting bit is sabotaged by the show being totally boring otherwise.

Really, this episode fails because it's supposed to be an emotional climax, and Sagrada Reset has never, ever succeeded at provoking an emotional response. Our main character has been pining over this dead girl for seven straight episodes, and yet I don't care at all that she's back. It might have meant something if Kei had ever expressed An Emotion, but that's never happened apart from a quick and underwhelming shot of tears at the beginning of this episode. I'm starting to suspect that his face is just stuck that way. It'd be one thing if his state as a stoically deterministic emotional cripple were a deliberate character flaw, but everyone else acts like that too, and the show emphasizes that Kei's rational problem-solving skills just make him a super awesome cool guy. The story's made a few overtures to regarding how much it must suck to repeat so much of your life over and over, but it's framed more like something we're supposed to be impressed by Kei for enduring rather than the source of his crippling detachment.

Regardless, he's been like that since he was a kid, as we see in some brief flashbacks. Apparently, Kei's memory retention power is so strong that it let him maintain his knowledge of abilities outside of Sakurada, which is a big no-no, so the Bureau isn't going to let him leave, and they erase his parents' memories of him to prevent a fuss. Kei assents to this without apparent conflict. Also, he may be tied to the root of whatever makes abilities happen. Of course.

I'll give this episode a slight bump since they finally brought Sumire back, so I can stop waiting for them to do that every week. Why is this show 24 episodes again? Next week looks like totally boring filler about Haruki out on the town. I'm not excited.

Grade: C+

Sagrada Reset is currently streaming on Amazon's Anime Strike.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.