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Sagrada Reset
Episode 4

by Gabriella Ekens,

How would you rate episode 4 of
Sagrada Reset ?
Community score: 3.5

Welcome back to another week of The Coldest Kids U' Know, Sagrada Reset. Episode 3 started with a timeskip following Sumire's death, which tragically could not be fixed since Kei had already reset time over something stupid. Several years later, Misora and Kei are performing small tasks for folks under the supervision of the abilities bureau. The story begins when a girl named Yoka Murase asks them to bring her cat back to life. They agree and run the request through the bureau, which approves it surprisingly quickly. Resetting back a few days, they find the cat without too much trouble, but they also discover that Murase is lying to them about its death, which sets off a series of revelations.

I'll run this part down in detail since it gets complicated. (It took me a few viewings to pin down exactly what happened, since there are so many time resets and odd character motivations.) First, Murase has designs to destroy the bureau and remake them according to her own ideals – thus the episode's title, Revolution Sunday. Her brother used to work for the bureau, but he died, and they refused to try bringing him back. Now a scorned Murase wants to coerce them into doing what she wants. To accomplish this, she uses her own ability, The Power to Erase Things She Specifies Out Loud When They're Touching Parts of Her Body, Which She Also Specifies. Obviously, this power is super strong in that she can kill people by touching them, effortlessly ripping through their flesh, but it can also do things that shouldn't make sense, like allowing her to fly by negating “gravity” and negating the effects of resets on her sometimes.

Murase assumed that Kei and Misora's powers would stand in the way of her battle against the bureau, so she used her cat's death to test her ability to cancel resets. When it worked, she decided to use them to get at the MacGuffin, a super powerful object that can control the abilities of everyone in town – only that part is a lie. Tsushima, a guy who works for the bureau, made it up in order to manipulate Murase in the hopes that Kei could befriend her and help her get over her vendetta, along with her grief. His plan works. In the end, Murase realizes the MacGuffin isn't real, sees that she doesn't have it in her to kill people (much less revolutionize the bureau by force), and finds a kindred spirit in Kei, who was unable to bring back Sumire using an ability several years ago.

So this all makes sense according to the rules of how abilities work. (Even if those abilities are kind of dumb.) The problems all come from a character standpoint, because the people involved have to act like total goobers. Tsushima gets the worst of it, since involving Kei like that could've easily gotten the kid killed. Hell, it did – in a hilariously brutal fashion – it's just that that death was part of Kei's risky plan. Still, I imagine this whole thing would have been way less risky if he'd just had some straightforward conversations with people instead of playing 8th dimensional chess with a girl's grief. Murase also had way more options than immediate murder, but I'm more lenient on that since her motivations were irrational in the first place. Kei himself has now firmly become a Koyomi Araragi type, suffering nobly in order to save women from their own emotional problems. I'll probably be bringing the Monogatari series up a lot going forward, since barring the massive difference in presentational styles, Sagrada Reset is close to the same thing in terms of its plot. Like Araragi, Kei is a ridiculously selfless guy who feels compelled to save ladies from supernatural metaphors for their personal issues. Then those ladies just happen to become so attached to him that they become part of his toolkit for dealing with the next lady. Well, I may be jumping the gun a bit – it's only the second arc, and I don't know where Kei's relationship with Murase will be going from here. That's just the obvious model to follow, which bodes ill for the show reflecting on the power dynamics in Kei and Misora's relationship.

Otherwise, the execution of this story was unnecessarily convoluted. Three other ability users were involved who I didn't even need to bring up in the main summary. The most prominent is Seika Nono, a girl who can possess cats while she's sleeping. She helps them find the cat. The next is Ryoji Yoshi, a dude who's like a vampire, but he eats information from a person's brain rather than blood. In one timeline, he accidentally kills Mirai Minami, a girl who can turn into a ghost, while feeding. It all works out like nothing happened, thanks to the resets. I assume that these characters will be important later, but this week they were only relevant to the mechanics of where the MacGuffin is at any given time. I couldn't figure out people's character motivations in that part at all (why would Minami steal it?), but it's ultimately not that important since the MacGuffin isn't real. (Or is it? Sumire is seen picking it up in the ED, after all.) This all could have been paced and plotted better, without so much chaff.

Production-wise, the show is still talking heads, but at least we got a good minute of Anime's Craziest Deaths content. I'll be happy if these episodes keep culminating in deadpan ultraviolence. Stain these tranquil blue skies red with blood, please. Preferably with more head explosions.

Grade: B-

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

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


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