Oshi no Ko Season 3

Episode 8

We are really getting into the endgame now on Oshi no Ko 3. When Aqua says “The curtain's already risen on the final act,” that's about the story itself. This week's episode, “Plan” kicks off the manga's ninth of eleven total arcs. With roughly 50 chapters of material remaining, I don't think season 3 is planning to cover the story through to the end (according to HIDIVE, it is predicted to be 11 episodes long). But at this late stage in the story, it feels like the ride is speeding up as it gathers downhill momentum. As the story approaches its conclusion, every scene feels critical. The tension has increased while the danger factor has amped up—especially now that we've seen the killer in action. As an extended flashback with Ai brings us full circle, the emotional core of Oshi no Ko feels closer than it ever has before.

Aqua made a unilateral decision to reveal information that isn't only his to reveal, and now he has to face the consequences. Ruby has all but disowned him; Miyako isn't far behind. Aqua chooses the wrong approach to appeal to the two—the pragmatic one—when he tells them, “[Ai's] secrets ought to be used to help the living.” On the surface, everybody wins: Kana's nonscandal gets buried while Ruby and Aqua's star power shoots way up, cascading down to more jobs for Kana and Memcho as well. But for Ruby and Miyako, the emotional toll of “digging up [Ai's] grave” does not match the payoff. In the scene when she tells Aqua she no longer considers him to be family, Ruby's crazed expression with dilated eyes shows she means it. Aqua gets a much warmer thanks from Kana in a subsequent, albeit tense scene, when the two are alone together at Strawberry Productions for the first time in what feels like ages. This simple, quiet moment with her crush to tell him about her plans for her idol career and her renewed focus on acting beyond that is a rare, hard-earned win for poor Kana.

Ruby tells Aqua he's changed, but through dramatic irony, viewers understand that Aqua has actually returned to his original mindset starting in toddlerhood: laser-focused on revenge. Of course he had a plan for the fallout of this big reveal. We soon learn that he and Director Gotanda have been coauthoring a script called “The 15 Year Lie.” Like Aqua said, a “miracle” had to happen to bring everything to this point, or at least a series of fortunate coincidences and possibly some magic. (Let's not forget about Season 2's crow girl when we see the crows above the scene between Ichigo and Aqua!) This movie is part of an elaborate scheme, but what's important right now is the reveal that Gotanda has been sitting on some footage of an unreleased B-Komachi documentary that hints at an unexplored, unfiltered side of Ai. It was oddly nostalgic to see this flashback of Ai. Even though she's been alive for so little of this series there's still no doubt that it's still her show; she's the ghost in its machine. The suggestion that the cheerful Ai we saw interacting with her own children might not have been the true Ai (teased, as ever, through a shift in her galaxy-like eyes, shifting the white stars to black) is irresistible. It won't just be the killer lured out by this movie, but the rest of us too.

In a show that puts so much emphasis and emotion in people's eyes, never trust somebody who never opens theirs. Yura tripped death flag after death flag when she chose to confide in her fox-eyed friend Miki about her hopes and dreams for the future, and worse yet, revealing her hobby was mountaineering. (Just like in Season 3 Episode 3, Oshi no Ko can't stop making allusions to people dying when they fall off of cliffs.) If you recently watched the post credits cliffhanger (haha sorry) at the end of Season 2, you picked up on Yura's impending doom even more quickly—she's clearly the blue-haired body at the bottom of the mountain back then. Yura's death felt inevitable, but this scene shocked in a different way: by showing Hikaru Kamiki's uncanny resemblance to Aqua, complete with dagger-like starry eyes. Oshi no Ko went from implications to straight-up truths, and it's making the show ever more captivating.

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Oshi no Ko Season 3 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and HIDIVE.

Lauren is a freelance journalist with a focus on anime fandom.