ZEGAPAIN – 10

Summary:
Ryoko is worried about the movie that she’s preparing to shoot and who’s going to play what role. She, Tomigai, and Mizuki are cleaning out the video club’s room when they come across a box of tapes. One of them falls out when Mizuki bumps into Ryoko, a tape labeled “The Day of The End of The World.” When she goes home, Ryoko watches the tape, which features shots of the city and various messages such as “the world faced the last day” and “we will become a dream’s existence tomorrow.” At school the next day, Ryoko is shooting more footage of Kyo swimming in the pool, but she’s still mad at him. Watching Shizuno in the pool, the group starts discussing going to the upcoming summer festival. Ushio drags Kawaguchi into the building to try to convince him to join the swim team, but Kawaguchi says that he hasn’t forgiven Kyo yet.
Ryoko suggests that they all go to the festival together, and Shizuno even asks if she can come along. Tomigai then suggests that Ryoko use Kawaguchi as the leading man in her upcoming movie. Kawaguchi is interested up until the point when Mizuki says that he’d be replacing Kyo for the part. Since he refuses, Ryoko goes back to her original replacement choice of Hayase, but Hayase isn’t around. Ushio says that Hayase is in the third-years’ classroom because he’s going out with a third-year named Tsumura Sachiko. However, the strange thing is that they haven’t met since Hayase entered school. Since Shizuno was the one who asked Ushio for Sachiko’s full name, Ryoko wonders if Shizuno knows the Kanou Tooru whose name was on the tape from before. All that Shizuno knows about this Kanou is that he stopped coming to school because of a sickness.
Kyo had figured out that something was fishy, so he asked Shizuno, Shima, and the others about it later. They tell him that both Tsumura Sachiko and Kanou Tooru were previous comrades killed in the war. Irie and Kuroshio explain that the server world accepts their deaths in various forms, from an accidental death to being transferred away to being around, but not meetable face-to-face as in the case of Sachiko. Shima says that when someone notices the inconsistency, that marks the awakening of a Celebrant. Kyo awoke because of Shizuno. Kuroshio says that although they don’t understand the mechanism for awakening, he thinks that they were chosen as adjusters, canceling out the inconsistencies. Shima adds that that role includes gaining back control over the real world. Minato feels that something is up with Ryoko and Shizuno wonders if those are signs that Ryoko is awakening.
In her own room, Ryoko is watching the rest of Kanou Tooru’s video and reading over her own screenplay. She crumples the notebook and throws it in the trash. Lying on her bed, Ryoko goes through the story in her head: a girl finds a rainbow colored shell on the beach the same morning that she meets a boy there. The boy has no memories, so the girl decides to take him in. Before long, the two fell in love with each other. Ryoko isn’t happy with her story, but wonders what the real thing is as she watches a message from the tape flash across the screen saying that world is ending momentarily. Meanwhile, on the Oceanus, the AIs explain that Kanou Tooru died in the first battle for Oscar. Tsumura Sachiko suffered serious damage to her data in that same battle and cannot be restored. They were made to be alive, but not really in the Maihama server world because, as Lemures says, too many deaths would be unnatural. With Ryoko having noticed Kanou Tooru’s existence, Shizuno starts wondering if it was influenced by her coming to Maihama. As for Kanou Tooru himself, Fosetta reports that he recorded the real Maihama right before he went back to the Maihama server.
Sunday morning, Ryoko and Mizuki go out together. Kyo catches them leaving, and asks where they’re going. A still-agitated Ryoko says that anywhere is good and goes off. As for the purpose of this outing, it’s because Ryoko wants to do some location hunting. She goes to one of the places from Kanou’s video and starts recording, trying to figure out what’s different and what’s the real thing. In one of the shots, Ryoko suddenly starts to get a double-vision through her camera, with an image of the city in ruins floating in and out until the image finally sticks. A surprised Ryoko puts down her camera and her view of the city goes back to normal. Later that day, the two are resting by the riverbank. Mizuki asks how long Ryoko is going to fight with Kyo, to which Ryoko answers that they’re not really fighting. Mizuki then admits that she’s liked Hayase and that the news of his girlfriend shocked her. But despite this, she’s going to tell him how she feels tonight at the festival.
When Ryoko gets home that night, she compares her video to Kanou’s video. She finally realizes that there are no people in Kanou’s version. Thinking about it, she concludes that Kanou was trying to draw the world more deeply. So what is it that she wants to draw? The story in her heads starts reforming: the boy is a soldier escaping from a battlefield world of ruins. But because of a transfer error, he lost his memory. The rainbow shell is the storage of his memories. The boy will return to his own world with his companions, but if he returns there now, his memories of this current world (with the girl) will disappear. He decides to put his memories into the rainbow shell, entrust the shell to the girl, and return to the battlefield. The next morning, Ryoko leaves for school after having completed her story, titled “Memory of the Rainbow.”
Today is the last day of the first term, meaning that the festival is tonight. Kurashige (Kyo’s teacher) even asks out Mizusawa (the nurse) to the festival. As night falls and the fireworks light up the sky, Kyo and his friends find themselves at the festival grounds waiting for Hayase to show up. He finally does, but isn’t looking very happy. Shizuno doesn’t join their group because she wants to avoid influencing this anymore. Ryoko is lagging behind the others when all of the sudden every single person around her disappears. This effect lasts until Kyo calls her name, wondering what’s up. With everyone else already far ahead, Kyo and Ryoko go off by themselves. As the night continues on, Mizuki does indeed confess to Hayase on a bridge, but he appears to turn her down and she ends up in tears. Meanwhile, watching the fireworks alone, Shizuno smiles at a cat that comes and rubs against her leg.
Ryoko and Kyo find themselves watching those same fireworks on a park bench. She tells him that she rewrote the scenario: the boy who had gone back to the battlefield returns to the girl’s world after the fighting is over. However, many tens of years have passed in this world. He finds the rainbow shell, inside of which contains his memories with the girl. But when he puts it up to his ear, he finds the shell broken – he can’t hear anything. Kyo thinks that it’s a sad way to end it and Ryoko agrees. However, he stands up and declares that he’ll appear in the movie as the leading role. A happy Ryoko stands up too, just as the fireworks reach the most dazzling part of the display. Watching them, Ryoko touches her hand to his.

Festival ED Sequence

Festival ED: 「and you」 by ROCKY CHACK
Watch the Festival ED! Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Yay for a special ED! They used the and you track from ROCKY CHACK’s Little Goodbye single. A nice mellow song. The ED sequence shows all the characters in their yukata, along with additional contrasting shots of Ryoko smiling like a little kid and Shizuno looking very alluring.

That was perhaps the most impressive fireworks display I’ve ever seen in an anime.
Seriously though, I’m really liking what they’re doing with this series. This episode was devoted almost entirely to the Maihama server world, which is actually a good thing. I’ve always thought that the stronger half of this series was in the server world with Ryoko and the others. In this episode, Ryoko is beginning to notice that things aren’t right, with people disappearing briefly in front of her eyes and buildings temporarily going to ruin while she’s filming them. And the others detect that she’s showing signs of awakening. Could this mean that she’ll be piloting a Zegapain in the not-so-far future?
And then there’s the scenario that Ryoko wrote, which mirrors the real world (the battlefield world of ruins, the boy losing his memory to a transfer error). If anything, I think the lovers in the scenario parallel the story of Kyo and Shizuno. We know that Shizuno has feelings for Kyo, but that he doesn’t have all his memories of what happened to him before all this. What he has to do is to figure out what those memories are by finding the equivalent of the rainbow shell…unless it happens to be broken too. Their romantic relationship hasn’t really gotten much focus for a while now, so I do hope that they build on that part of the story more.
But yea, like I said, I really like the plot development here. And even without that, this episode would have gotten good marks in my book because of the special ending lol. As for next week, the preview concentrated pretty heavily on Arque and Chris, making me think that she might die next episode.