Sagrada Reset

Episode 6

So there's some more nonsense going on in Abilitytown, and Kei has to deal with it again. This time there's someone running around and blocking people's abilities. The culprit starts with an old dude, Sasano, who can enter photographs to interact with bits of the past for a little while. Kei agrees to help in exchange for letting him interact with a picture of Sumire, that girl who died years ago. This endeavor puts Kei face-to-face with the bureau again, albeit in a different way this time.

You see, the bureau's resident witch has decided to have a word with our hero. This "witch" is a woman with a very special ability who the bureau keeps trapped in their headquarters and serves as the centerpiece of their “system.” (It's a system of monitoring ability-users, I presume.) In spite of her isolation, she seems to live comfortably. That powerful ability of hers is future vision, which the bureau uses to predict every problem that will befall them. She can see her entire future constantly, along with the futures of others when she's in physical contact with them. Also, she's the reason Kei came to Sakurada in the first place.

That's right, Kei's an outsider, not that it stood in the way of him developing an ability. Years ago, a young Kei ran away from home to find his place in the world, as 12-year-olds are wont to do. He boarded a train headed to Sakurada and received a call from the witch on the way. She warned him that getting off at Sakurada would change him forever, so he'd have to leave everything else behind. Of course, he didn't heed the warning (or took it as an invitation), leading to the adventures that we know and love(?) today. The witch knew that her call would convince Kei to get off, so she confirms in this episode that she's brought him here for a specific reason.

She doesn't specify that reason yet, obviously. Gotta keep up the suspense somehow. This also raises a bunch of questions about how Kei sustains himself in this town. Does the bureau keep him housed? Do his parents know about any of this? In another show, I might stress these questions more, but Sagrada Reset is already so lacking in plausible human behavior that I don't find myself caring all that much. Anyway, the witch apologizes to him for stuff that's going to happen later and reveals that she's dying. Moving on.

Kei goes outside and runs into the girl who's blocking people's abilities, Eri Oka. It turns out that she's motivated by a personal vendetta against Kei – as his underclassman, she looked up to him two years ago, but she dislikes the person he's become. (He seems pretty invariably frigid between years to me, but what do I know?) Her plan is to steal the MacGuffin and block Haruki's ability, all to hurt him as much as she can. My bet that she's become a “villain,” in her own words, in an attempt to connect with Kei, and that she'll end up in his repertoire of female accomplices regardless.

This gets us to another issue – the MacGuffin might be real? It was already pretty eye-rolly when it lived up to its named as a desired object that doesn't actually matter on its own in the context of the story. It's downright dumb that it might be able to control this town full of ability users. Actually, I think I know what might be up – maybe Sumire's soul is contained in that thing, and “controlling abilities” is her own ability? Sumire's obviously going to come up again somehow, and she's shown picking up that rock in the ending sequence. The witch also tells Haruki a story about a person stuck in a rock. On the surface, this is supposed to make Haruki reflect on her passivity and love for Kei, but it may also be clever foreshadowing.

On the sidelines, Murase can no longer use her ability to track people down. They try to justify this with the trauma of making Kei's head explode that one time, but I think it's because that would make it too easy to solve problems later on in the series.

This arc is already better than the last one, but it's not like that was difficult. Sagrada Reset still isn't particularly compelling, but at least there are stakes, hints of an overall story, and changes in where the shot-reverse-shot conversations are set every once in a while. At this point, Sagrada Reset has set a low bar for itself, and I can only hope that this “girl gets trapped in a rock” narrative ends up better than the last one.

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.