To Your Eternity Season 3

Episode 5

One of the funniest things about watching “To Your Eternity” is how we can get lines like this in the weekly recap: “Izumi was killed by her daughter, Mizuha. But mysteriously, Izumi continued to live.” Not only is it wild that those two sentences can be simultaneously true without canceling each other out, but we are also reminded of the reveal that Izumi's ghost is very much around and going to be involved in future matters. Naturally, the Nokkers aren't actually gone, but the only explanation for this that our heroes can come up with is that The Black One simply made a little goof when he declared the Nokker threat extinguished for good all those centuries ago. Nothing gets to be simple for our beloved Orb-Thing, even in a world with such miracles as bubble tea.

Of course, the real trial that Fushi is faced with this week comes not from the horrible threat of ancient, immortal beings who could extinguish all humanity, but something even more strange and unknowable: The public education experience for secondary schoolers in Japan. You could, on the one hand, criticize both the show and Bon himself for simply plopping Fushi into the middle of high-school stint without even giving him a crash course on what school even is, but then we would have missed out on delightfully relatable scenes like Fushi going all ADHD on his mechanical pencil and pissing of the teachers with his lack of basic etiquette.

The nonchalant attitude that this entire society has towards Fushi and Co. being so ill-informed about modern society is mostly played for laughs, which I don't mind; I'd say the hijinks are a fair trade for some somewhat messy storytelling. If I were trying to treat the universe of To Your Eternity as literally as possible, I could poke all sorts of holes in the way that the narrative has treated the resurrection and restored memories of a dozen ancient, quasi-magical beings and their immortal Orb-Thing bestie. Clearly, though, the show is less interested in directly attacking the philosophical quandaries of the new status quo, since it would get in the way of playing with all of the classic high-school anime tropes. It's definitely bizarre to see Fushi engaged in conversations with petty teenagers about the bitchy promiscuity of his new friends, but not in a bad way. It's a side of humanity that Fushi never would have been able to see if he hadn't escaped the more primal and survival-focused times of the first part of the story. Plus, the new routine gives us the best line of the week, where Gugu is asked if he went to school with his Chameleon mask on, and he just responds, “Of course!” No further explanation needed.

Until the other shoe inevitably drops, we've at least gotten some good material that does play on the unique and fairly tragic circumstances of our heroes' lives. Mizuha is, once again, vying for Fushi's heart, but Fushi has grown enough to at least be able to articulate his feelings about…well, feelings. Not only does he seem to be some variation of asexual/aromantic at his core, but he also recognizes that his immortality makes the idea of a romantic relationship a non-starter. It's a predictable but welcome bit of characterization for Fushi, who spent so much of this story only able to be characterized based on his reactions to the behavior of everyone else around him. An even better moment comes at the end, when Tonari confronts Fushi and asks him if he's thought about how chumming around with Mizuha might look to friends like March. Just because they're all living in a young-adult dramedy now doesn't mean that the terrible circumstances of their pasts are all gone.

As much as I enjoy the simple pleasures of riffing on genre cliches, I'm much more interested in how To Your Eternity will (hopefully) subvert the usual beats of the old “school days” routine that Fushi is now stuck in. The fact that we can see those endless webs of Fushi's vines all over the place is a constant reminder that, for all of its familiar trappings, this world is not our Earth. There are gods and monsters and magics of all sorts to contend with, lurking just beneath the veneer of this modern civilization. That is just too good a setup for the show to waste on an extended nostalgia trip.

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.