ERASED – Episode 10

Noooooo. Nooooooooo. Noooooo o o o o o ooo.

ERASED did it. It did the worst thing it could do, and it did it bad. Holy crap this episode. What a mess.

I’m so sad. This show was really good. Why would it do this.

noooooooo

review here, losing-it notes below

ERASED

“There is so much that is still missing. And yet I think that filling in that missing thing is what life is.”

Trying to save Aya Nakanishi this time

She’s reading King Lear

Their hideout is entirely visible from this side of the river. Lol

And she makes fun of superheroes

This episode’s actually really cute, which is quite the change of pace

Nakanishi actually accepts the invitation to see their hideout

And their friend Kazu ends up becoming closer friends with Aya

“I think getting rid of someone’s ‘alone time’ is a great idea.” All of the people who were kidnapped were isolated in some way, again reflecting the main theme

Misato Yanagihara, the jerk girl, is now the one who’s isolated

Satoru’s friends commenting on him making a big deal of seeing them again every day

This scene in Yashiro’s car is intentionally framing him in villainous ways. The ominous closing of the seat belt, the framing of the red skyline, the shots that cut out his face, the focus on his gloves

“The essence of a person’s good deeds and bad deeds are the same. They’re both based in a desire to get over a defect in yourself.”

“There is no candy in there. After all, this isn’t my car.”

EVIL SMILE TIME

“Filling up that missing something in your heart is the happiest moment”

EXPLAINING HIS EVIL PLAN

“This is my true form.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME

Explaining how he has multiple cars. What is this garbage

And this basically stabs against the “learning to trust” theme for the sake of cheap genre thrills

“It’s like you’ve seen the future.” Wow wow WOW. WHAT IS THIS STORYTELLING. WHAT IS WRITING. WHAT IS ANYTHING

22 thoughts on “ERASED – Episode 10

  1. You know what…. I’m beginning to understand more of why you gave it such a low score. When ERASED is “good” it’s great so when it isn’t “good” it’s bad. When it’s any other show, well then it’s just corny and obvious, but when it’s ERASED, for those of us who truly appreciate the writing, it’s a betrayal, and in a time when most of what comes out isn’t worth our time, I do got to say, it does cut fairly deep.

    Now, yes, i still don’t believe that this episode deserves such a low score, as a reviewer. In disappointment, I would certainly respect that( and I do respect your review, I just don’t fully agree with it), but a D- is for a filler episode in Naruto, or an non conclusive ending, not for a show that may have stumble and tripped, but, if done well, could produce a solid, hopefully satisfying ending.

    P.S.- I don’t think I used a period at all in that paragraph, that isn’t good.

    • You’re getting at part of it here, but yeah, this is a reflection of differing philosophies on how scores should work. ERASED getting a D- here is a combination of two things:

      First, I always choose my episodic scores relative to my expectations for the show. An “A” for a show like ERASED is very different from an “A” for a show like Active Raid – the range of expectations I have for each show is obviously very different, and it’d be silly to give every episode of Active Raid a very similar score because it’s all relatively mediocre crime procedural stuff. So this episode of ERASED was graded more harshly for existing in a review framework with higher expectations.

      Second, this episode of ERASED also wasn’t just bad in the abstract, but was also very damaging for the show overall. A single bad vignette in a show full of episodic stories is less damaging than an episode that stumbles hard in the core storytelling, and my score here also reflects that.

    • I don’t think filler on its own warrants a D-. Being bad warrants a D-. If a filler episode is entertaining and/or somehow adds to the themes of a series, it deserves way better than a D-.

  2. Haven’t watched the episode myself, but I’ve read the manga. And while I find it this part to be rather thrilling, I was still very disappointed that the series took the “Sharp and smart-looking teacher is evil” trope. I was happy when he seemed like he was going to be a nice guy despite how he looked, but then no, he IS evil after all. Shame.

    Didn’t help that everything just isn’t the same since then and his motivation/backstory was just boring, generic, and rather contrived. And it didn’t help that it looks like it’s going to be 12 episodes, and we’re just starting a new arc here. We’re likely going to have “read the manga!” ending here.

    Basically? Prepare yourself, this is going to be turning into a trainwreck. Shame, such a nice series too.

  3. Aw, I expected you to dislike the twist, but not this far.

    I think this is where the anime’s strength turns into weakness. The manga from the start was no more than a decent-to-good genre piece, but the anime gives too much strength to its atmosphere and perhaps weight to Kayo’s story, to the point that it creates an expectation that it’s more than a genre piece. It also lessens the strength of its thriller by making Yashiro so blindingly obvious the killer with his every scene.

    I’m reiterating what I said, but in the manga, I was actually genuinely surprised that Yashiro is the killer. But in the anime, even though I know the twist beforehand, I still think “are you kidding me with this unsubtlety and over-the-top evil smile.” It’s a double whammy of amplifying the anime’s weakness (overdramatization of the thriller aspect) AND turning its strength into weakness.

    It’s a bit off-point, but this conclusion is in line with what is established at the start that Satoru is fixing the past with a price. In this case, the price of preventing murder of three people is his life.

    At this point, I’m just hoping to see the following one last Kayo scene animated wonderfully.

    • Yeah, that sounds like a good explanation! From everything I’ve heard, the anime really did add something special to this story, but you can’t really change the plot itself.

      • I think a large part of it is that the anime elevates not the storytelling, but the delivery – music, shot-framing, etc.

        And while the car ride definitely had the shot-framing, the music part really fell flat exactly where it was called on to be over the top. Heck, an over the top Yuki Kaijura treatment might’ve been a bit ridiculous, but this scene called for it, ending a bit flat as it did without.

  4. Yeah. The show betrayed me. Here I was commenting last week about hoping it wasn’t Yashiro, and they gone done it. You’re right, it totally undermined the themes of trust and basically traded off meaningful ideas for cheap thriller beats. It was too overly obvious, but when it happened, shocking not for the sake that it was a really surprising reveal, but shocking in the sense that it was just so utterly terrible.

    I’m with you on this one. It was a beautiful failure.

    • As a manga reader, I’ve been both dreading and anticipating the reaction to this reveal, especially from my favorite anime reviewers such as yourself. While I’m glad that your criticisms of the show don’t boil down to, “The killer was who I guessed it would be, BURN IT” like many of the responses I’ve seen to this episode, I still disagree with your assessment. Was the reveal anticlimactic and cheesy? Yes. I don’t think anyone could refute that, but in my opinion it fits the themes of the show, and I’m confused as to why you see this as such a break from previous episodes. ERASED isn’t a mystery, from the beginning, Yashiro was really the only plausible suspect. The show had to go ham with the reveal because it’s the one thing this show has been building up to, and it prioritized entertainment over everything else, as it always has. In retrospect, I cringe at the reveal scene, but while I was watching it, I was so engrossed I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen. When I re-watched the episode with those criticisms in mind, I immediately forgot about them the moment I started watching. The manga is very similar in this way, it’s not very good in retrospect but brilliant in the moment.

  5. All this talk about ‘betraying the show’s overall narrative’ is silly. The truth is that this show never had a solid foundation to begin with. It’s produced a few great moments so far (all centering around the relationship between Satoru and Kayo), but it’s never had ‘moral complexity’ or ‘thematic integrity.’ It’s an average whodunnit with a time travel twist, and it always has been.

    • “But that’s just like, your opinion man”. You call it average, but to be average than tell me 3 shows that stand with it? Steins Gate, what other show have you watched that compares and shares the same ideas?

  6. << And this basically stabs against the “learning to trust” theme for the sake of cheap genre thrills >>

    To be fair, I don’t think “learning to trust” could ever be the main theme of a story about children in a town where a serial killer is at large. “Learning to trust the right people”, if anything. I mean, it’s definitely played in a corny way, but this kind of situation is exactly the one where you DON’T WANT to be too trusting, even in real life.

    • I think the “trust” theme Bobduh is referring to is a valid one, because it’s what Airi and Satoru share. In a world where everyone is “alone”, trust is something that comes off as a value that is easily robbed from us, at least in modern society.

      Yashiro just refuted the whole possibility of ever believing in that sense of trust. To a certain extent, I guess that’s true. You really can’t trust anyone. But if the show was moving towards that kind of reveal, it shouldn’t have bothered giving us any reason to hope in the first place.

      Many people I’ve seen complaining, apparently, have read the manga. I, for one, haven’t. That said, I was kinda hoping the villain wouldn’t be Yashiro (I must have looked silly commenting in last week’s post saying that I was distrusting the storytelling, thinking that they were framing Yashiro too obviously as the villain, and what a twist it would be if her weren’t him) – praying that he was just a victim and that “trust” would really be something central in the narrative. But it wasn’t.

      Maybe it’s a fault of the narrative combined with the good execution of previous episodes that lead to this meltdown of a 10th episode. The feeling now is that of a cheap thriller beat, which is what Bobduh’s trying to say I think – and that’s coming from people who invested themselves in the show not knowing what to expect. So I think it’s unfair to say “you should’ve seen it coming” or “it was obvious, why are you complaining now” because all shows deserve the benefit of having the watcher suspend their disbelief. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be any fun to watch.

      • Since when did Yashiro become the embodiment of trust? He’s been acting shiftily since the start of the series. Frankly it sounds like people started getting some attachment to him last episode, then felt betrayed by his turnover in episode 10.

      • I personally never liked OR trusted Yashiro that much – he always looked shady to me, and I think the signals were all there. So it wasn’t a huge blow to the “trust” theme for me, nor I think that a message like “learn to trust people” itself would be worth much. The entire point of living in society is learning to judge the right amount of trust to accord to people. Satoru failed initially by giving no trust to anyone by default, true, and you don’t get anywhere like that. But that doesn’t mean that you need to trust everyone equally either. There IS a reason why mistrust is born, and that’s people who actually abuse of the others’ good faith.

  7. Well, there are plenty of things I agree with and disagree with in the comments, but honestly? I %100 agree with the review. A couple of thoughts I have though are:

    If you are talking about trust, I can see why it would be shocking to have a teacher – who is often a central part of smaller Japanese communities, from my understanding – turn out to be the killer. However, to even remotely call this a twist with how he has been framed throughout the show is stretching quite a bit. Regardless as to whether it was truly a surprise in the manga, the people who had a hand in storyboarding and planning the anime should have had a much better game plan than the execution they went with if it was supposed to be a surprise here. Heck, even if it wasn’t supposed to be a surprise, there is certainly a much more masterful way they could have approached it – according to those who have read the manga, they already handled things like atmosphere and whatnot much more skillfully. That would have probably been much more faithful to the manga (haven’t read it myself).

    Secondly – where on earth could the series possibly go from here?? I like the idea that Satoru had to exchange his life to save the others it’s logical and fitting when we talk about messing with history – though certainly kind of trite (but let’s be real, if Yashiro-Sensei is really that awful a person, I’m sure he’s just going to slaughter others in whatever town he ends up in next).

    I think it’d be cool if instead of having ultimately saved the three students that, in the end, no matter how many times Satoru tries to save them, they end up dying but at the hands of a different perpetrator every time – like it is their fate to die and that somehow, every person has a timeline where they are the killer – like some kind of overarching theme that says there exists a possible combination of life events and characteristics has the potential to turn us all into murderers (dark, yes, and I don’t believe it, but still interesting)

    OR

    Perhaps Satoru dies and suddenly it’s Kayo who has his time travel abilities and finds herself modern day trying to figure these things out until she ends up back in the town, trying to save him and the others (btw, I really like Kayo’s story).

    Anyway, that’s my two cents. I really hated this episode.

  8. For me ERASED at its best when if focuses on the drama and at its worst when it focuses on the thriller. I think they do rush the story at the end here to the expense of other little genuine parts. One of my favorite part from the manga: getting to know Aya and making her part of the group was done in just 6 minutes in the anime; we missed the time where Sawada came to meet his mom when they were young and he slipped out his name (or did I miss it?); and even the time when Kayo came back from bus to see Satoru before the main twist happened…
    Next week we gonna know more about the past of Yashiro and how Satoru was after the main event; so there is still meat left. I mean now when the thriller part was over I’m in hope that they could focus more on the drama and wrap it up well here.

  9. My response was same as yours. I was hilariously wrong last week where I assumed it wouldn’t be the teacher due to his parallel with Yuuki.

    And the entire car ride felt like an episode of Death Note. I didn’t even mind Death Note which was fun in its own campy, melodramatic way. But this show was something else… man.

    I don’t even know what thematic statement the show is trying to pull off now, but I’ll give it the other 2 episodes and see if it can salvage something.

  10. I don’t think the problem really is that the teacher turned out to be the killer. In all honesty, the first time Yashiro appeared – when Satoru went back in time and got to school – in class, I knew immediately he was the killer. The way the scene of his close-up went, its duration- they lingered alot on him, and his friendly-seeming smile; it was honestly so obvious. But I think that the show still could have pulled it off greatly, even with the obvious choice of the nice teacher being the killer. I think the main problem was the writing and the way they stereotyped the characters of Yashiro and Satoru and made them flat. I mean honestly, “I can’t live without you”? How many times did we hear this sentence in the numerous stories about murders. It’s true that from episode 10 it all went to hell and the ending was very weak. Maybe the only thing that saved the ending was relating the Hinazuki’s quote about “The Town Where Only I am Missing” to Satoru and his situation.

    I’ve started reading the manga, and I’ve been told the ending is very different, so I look forward to see how it works out and I hope it won’t disappoint like the anime.

Comments are closed.