Sagrada Reset

Episode 7

You know, the Abilities Bureau seems kinda incompetent. This week, Kei resets time following Eri Oka's antagonistic confession. She's declared that she'll ruin everyone Kei knows, starting with Misora, yet he doesn't contact the authorities until after her powers are stolen. Or at least I assume so. You think they might try to detain an ability user who's using her powers to threaten people, especially since they knew about Eri's power beforehand. But I guess they'll just outsource the job to a couple of impossibly deadpan teens.

As it turns out, Eri idolizes Kei because he told her how to deal with her abusive dad when they were younger. Kei also recommended that she take up her mother's last name, Oka, leading to the persona she uses now. This convinced her that she needed to do morally questionable things (like blackmail her own dad) to be a hero like Kei. However, according to her bizarro logic, since Kei is already a hero, she needs to become a villain, leading her to both resent and pedestalize him. I'm not really sure how this dynamic is supposed to work. My guess is that there's supposed to be a difference between Kei's old self and his new one (not that we can tell),so Eri hates him for having friends now, maybe? They also keep talking about him like he was some sort of bad boy, which is not apparent at all. The whole idea doesn't work since Kei continues to not express any emotion ever, even when Haruki loses her powers in a painfully avoidable confrontation. This conflict is all about how he's changed as a person, when he hasn't changed in any noticeable way and barely even seems like a person in the first place. As an aside, they knew that Eri was after Haruki. Couldn't they have warned her against going outside? Or at least gotten her a chaperone?

Eri's ability involves fabricating or erasing memories by making prolonged eye contact with people. So she can make them forget abilities, but only one overwrite works on a person at a time. She also seems to be working for someone else who knows a lot about the Bureau. Her employer is probably the one after the MacGuffin – Eri mostly seems interested at getting back at Kei. In the end, Eri doesn't believe that Kei's stupid rock is the MacGuffin, so she traps him in a photograph and runs off to mess with Haruki's head some more.

In the meantime, it looks like the photo man Sasano is up to a scheme himself. He goes into a photo to talk to a lady who gives him orders. (Note: it turns out that his ability activates when he takes a photo and not when he rips it up to go inside later. So without his ability, he can still enter photos – he just can't produce any new ones.) Apparently he wants to revive her, even if it ends up costing a lot of other people. This may have something to do with Eri's employer, or maybe not. Eri does steal his photos with the intent of destroying them, so they must amount to something.

Overall, this arc is an improvement in that things are happening and there appear to be stakes. The animation is still nonexistent and the character stuff doesn't work at all, but that's how low Sagrada Reset's standards have gotten. It wasn't really a dramatic descent – just the show confirming its worst potential to be ugly, poorly written, and boring. I hope that this arc will end with a bang, at least. We must recapture the thrills of Kei having his brains obliterated.

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.