To Your Eternity Season 3

Episode 11

I figured it was just a matter of time before To Your Eternity delivered an episode delving into the backstory of Mizuha's mother, Izumi, and I also figured it'd get pretty dark. This is, after all, the show where characters get handed traumatic childhoods and abusive parents like they were free samples of delicious spinach dip at a busy Costco on Sunday. I certainly wasn't expecting Fushi of all people to be the source of all that trauma, though, especially when the target of his violence is the Nokkers infesting Mizuha and Izumi's bodies.

Speaking of things that were only a matter of time, I knew based on everything happening this season that we would eventually reach the “Show Tries to Make Us Empathize With the Nokkers” phase of the story, but it's pretty wild that To Your Eternity went there just one week after giving us the most disturbing and horror-coded presentation of the creepy-crawly parasites yet. Still, even Fushi couldn't deny that it was wrong to infest Izumi's stolen corpse with vines and then explode her from the inside with molten lava, no matter how incredibly satisfying and surprisingly brutal a finishing move it would be. This arc has brought on a lot of fast changes in Fushi's understanding of the darker side of humanity, but he's not quite reached the point where he can execute a crying mother in cold blood while her daughter begs for mercy.

You know who else we have to feel bad for, now, too? The ghost of the real Izumi, who makes it very clear to Bon how broken she feels after seeing her daughter, without any seeming influence from her half-merged Nokker, loudly declares that the body-snatcher parasite that is currently puppeting Izumi's flesh is a better mother to her than Izumi ever was. Right on signal, this cues up an extended flashback that explains just how Izumi came to be such a distant, high-strung, and overbearing parent. It turns out that being born into a fanatical, Nokker-worshipping cult and living a life marked with paranoia, regret, and increasingly dark spirals into suicidal depression will make it difficult to be the best possible parent you can be —and that's before Izumi gets her own little Nokker hitchhiker that makes that paranoia so much worse. My favorite detail that comes with all of this new context is how we now see that Izumi's obsessive selfie habit was a result of her not knowing how much her own body and mind were even hers to control anymore.

In the end, while the new worldbuilding and characterization details are cool, the main purpose of “Their Home” is that it just makes Fushi's job as mankind's protector that much harder. It's bad enough that Mizuha and Nokker!Mizuha are actually on the same page, and that she's leading an increasingly large underground cult of Nokker acolytes. Now we know that there are Nokkers like the new Izumi who can at least convincingly play the part of the devoted and loving parent. Back in the times of kings and monsters, it was easy to fight a war against a horde of insidious, alien parasites that only seemed capable of destroying and perverting the legacies of the dead. What's an Orb to do in this new, gray world of uncertainty and doubt?

Episode Rating:

To Your Eternity Season 3 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.