To Your Eternity Season 3

Episode 9

I'm sure everyone was wondering just how in the hell To Your Eternity was going to make the transition from last week's episode to this one work, given that we ended with the utterly absurd and tone-shattering gag of Hirotoshi flashing his shibari-bound dick-and-balls to Fushi and his friends. In what is quickly becoming the typical fashion of this Future Arc, To Your Eternity's solution is to roll with the insanity and treat it as just another facet of the Orb's eternal battle against the Nokkers. As I said before, I respect the show's completely unhinged commitment to doing whatever the fuck it wants in this final act of the story. Still, I can also respect how a lot of folks will probably be desperately groping for the EMERGENCY STOP lever so they can get off this ride before things get too insane.

Of course, regardless of the new and deranged fixations this shift in genre and setting has incurred, this is still To Your Eternity, which means that it is still going to take its characters and their struggles seriously - even the perverted otaku brother and his psychotic little-sister doppelganger. We'll just have to table Hirotoshi's other… “fixations” for now and meet the show halfway when it presents him as someone who genuinely does care about the real Mimori's life and happiness, because that is the emotional crux around which this entire episode revolves.

As you might have been able to guess, the Nokkers of this new era aren't just targeting random victims for kicks. The real Mimori, in her ghostly form, made it clear last week that Fushi should just let the Nokker keep her body, and we learn that it's because the poor girl doesn't believe that her own life is worth taking back. The show previously implied that Mimori's death was an act of suicide, and this week it becomes clear that this was the case. Mimori was neglected by her garbage mother and left to wallow in her misery and sadness for so long that the Nokker was able to slip in and take over while she was still alive. From the Nokker's point of view, it was a blessing to Mimori by taking over and suffering through her worst times, though its completely cavalier attitude about letting Mimori “escape” her unhealthy mind is obviously not the approach that an empathic, human creature would take.

All of this is to say that To Your Eternity manage to genuinely, if clumsily, redeem Hirotoshi by putting him in the position of the only adult in her life who recognizes that a child like Mimori shouldn't have ever been put in the position to choose between a lifetime of neglect or the oblivion of death in the first place. I don't know if that makes it any less absurd when we arrive at a climax that involves Hirotoshi getting beaten within an inch of his life before a stranger arrives out of nowhere and straight-up decapitates Nokker Mimori so the real one can have her body and life back, but the To Your Eternity is owning its own absurdity with enough brazen confidence that I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else, there's absolutely nothing like it that you're going to find any time soon.

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.