ERASED was definitely much better this week, though a performance like last episode isn’t something a show can really recover from. I get into it in my review, but ultimately, it feels like ERASED would have been better off just not having a serial killer at all. The cat and mouse stuff in both timelines is almost uniformly worse than the rest of the show’s material, and the show doesn’t actually need a killer for this story to work. But either way, this episode was relatively low-key and full of nice character moments, so it falls in the good column even if it also included a speech about murdering hamsters. You take what you can get.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!
Oh my god, this story about the hamsters. Well, this is the show I’m watching
Oh my god, this OP. Satoru has been… ERASED
Quiet scenes with Satoru’s mom
Satoru lives!
SATORU WAS IN A COMA FOR FIFTEEN YEARS GODDAMNIT
Now the young Satoru is his internal voice, which is an interesting choice
And his memories are scrambled
So he’s not sure who he is
Kenya and Hiromi have become a lawyer and a doctor
This is definitely a very different show from the show it was before, but eh, whatever
His mom’s trying to avoid the topic of his past
“If it’s what Mom wishes, I guess I don’t have to remember”
He meets Hinazuki, who has a baby now. SO MANY TEARS
She married Hiromi
They felt guilty about leaving Satoru behind and pursuing their own happiness
High five from the baby
Gossip rag reporters want to talk to him
Rehabing himself back together
Some girl at the rehab room keeps watching him
This episode is nice!
Kumi is the girl. She’s worried about her bone marrow transplant
Being a small hero in his own way again
“Want me to tell you how to muster up courage?”
“I was your homeroom teacher, Yashiro.” BIRDS FLY AWAY
He got married five years ago and changed his name
His father-in-law was a city councilman, and now he’s on the council himself
“I have a feeling you’ll make a great politician, Mr. Yashiro”
Shots of the knife peeling the apple. This is better stuff
And lots of shots avoiding Yashiro’s face
And the slow build of Mr. Yashiro
The tapping glove again. Good, this is much better
“I have my memories back!”
Sigh. I agree that this episode was a good step up from last week. The atmospheric tone set in the first sequence was a good “reset”, and it was reassuring to see that Satoru was alive…
But man, I hate it when people get the medical stuff all wrong. Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t in the medical field – because I’m wondering why Satoru doesn’t at the very least have a PEG or some other kind of feeding tube… or even a tracheostomy to protect his airway since he’s comatose, blah blah blah
Well, at least they got the rehab part right… sorta.
I need to shut up.
It’s at least a major step up from a similar situation from the director’s other series, SAO. When, after being trapped in the VR world for 2 years, Kirito just stood up and went for a stroll I felt as though my brain was being sucked out of my head.
One thing, he’s NOT back at present day. This is a new timeline where the 3 children in his hometown was never murdered and he never professionally draw a single panel of manga. It’s also 3 years away from the flashback point from the initial timeline.
Unfortunately changing the source material (drastically) is one thing you just absolutely cannot do, at least in the current anime climate. It makes me think how amazing it was the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime can went the way it does… but then you have to remember the later inevitable fan backlash after the manga continues on and shows how different it is to the point that it gets a full remake.
It is a really good idea in retrospect though considering the difference of the medium and the strength of the anime. Basically you just need to make what actually happened in the past as a series of unrelated deaths (in the case of Kayo, directly due to her abusive parent), change what happens to Satoru’s Mom to some kind of unfortunate accident, then change Satoru’s “death” to him getting an accident by saving another child who are supposed to get the accident. I think it’s actually an even better twist by turning the expectation of the manga readers upside down.
Well, back to reality, they considerably cut a lot of materials from the manga here, though I think for the better. Most of them are just more cat-and-mouse with Yashiro. I suspect they’ll move Satoru’s re-meeting with Airi to the last episode. I hope they give one or two extra scenes with Kayo though. Though the scene already give a proper resolution to Kayo’s story, I’m hoping for more closure since they give her story much more weight in the anime.
“Unfortunately changing the source material (drastically) is one thing you just absolutely cannot do, at least in the current anime climate.”
I don’t have a problem with material changes per se (though I can understand the disappointment as a manga reader to see the anime missing a scene you wanted to watch animated), but you have to admit there are often quality issues correlated with them. To put it simply, manga artists often have more artistic freedom and a more organic creation process when doing their thing. When TV writers put their hands on the material and start altering it they seldom give it the same love and attention its original author did, which leads to loss of consistency and general degradation. Case in point: FMA, as you mentioned, where the changes corresponded to huge departures from both world building consistency and core message of the show. In the manga and Brotherhood, Ed is a flawed and hot-blooded but fundamentally moral person who abides by his principle. In the first anime, he’s a self-contradicting, inconsistent timebomb who will act decent one day and be a complete asshole the next, depending on the whim of the current writer. The entire subplot of him and Al thinking about cutting off his arm from Wrath would not have existed in the manga because sane people don’t think about chopping arms off innocent children, and because Ed didn’t stop at the superficial meaning of humanity but rightfully considered “human” anything who had a proper level of intelligence and self-awareness was a core element of his character (given that, as he himself said, if he didn’t he should consider his brother not to be human to begin with). The problem with the first FMA isn’t that it deviates from the manga in terms of plot, but that in doing so it thoroughly shits on the established themes of the series, demonstrating that the writers clearly didn’t understand them, and goes on to just throw around random shock value. In this sense it’s a feeling remarkably similar to how Bob commented ERASED’s last episode.
I don’t know what the ERASED manga is like (I’ll probably read it once the anime’s over and find out) but whatever changes they made they blend in far better for me. If anything, it was the previous episode that broke the mood the most. Then of course it may as well be that the manga IS better written and that reading it one gets to realize how the story could have been improved.