© Rumiko Takahashi・Shogakukan/Urusei Yatsura Anime Production Committee
This episode made me more curious about the forum discussions than the episode itself. Unfortunately, the idea of multiple verses and branching timelines has been one of the most played out stories of the past few years. While we already have an explanation for the future we saw last week involving Shinobu, this episode boils down to the fact that there are many possible scenarios in the future and we only have a glimpse of one of them. However, this may not seem important because anyone who watches this show knows that the future we see in this episode cannot and probably will not happen, given the social dynamics of everyone in the current timeline we’re looking at. It was interesting to look at it a bit last week and realize that the reason why Shinobu was in the spotlight was because this chapter was based on a chapter written very early in the series before Shinobu was written off in exchange for Ataru and Lum pairing. due to the popularity of the latter. It’s interesting to see these alternate futures as potential endings of where the series could go if the characters were received differently.
My favorite joke in this episode is the spot the difference game, where it’s just a spot the difference game. became a case of “Hey, look at this,” and most of it wasn’t very funny. There is also the introduction of a new character named Inaba, who is responsible for developing this plot. I laughed as he tried to downplay how serious everything seemed. His gimmick seems to be that of being a loser and always causing trouble, but the downside is that he doesn’t have much of a presence. When the show was trying to hook him up with Shinobu, a character who had barely had anything to do with the show for dozens of episodes, I rolled my eyes because it wasn’t interesting at all.
A lot of the characters in the movie can be boiled down to a gimmick or archetype, and maybe this is the writers’ way of giving Shinobu some extra layers with a potential happy ending, because realistically is that she was very confused when the story decided to shift the focus away from her. The show could pick up the plot again in the next episode as an additional episode will air next week, making this one of the longest story lines in this reboot. I hope that it ends as enjoyable as it began.
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Urusei Yatsura is now streaming on HIDIVE.