The anime kinda killed it this week, folks. Well, alright, at least one anime specifically killed it, and that anime constitutes a large enough percentage of my weekly quality variance that it alone killing it pretty much lifts the whole ship. To put a finer point on it, this week’s episode of A Place Further than the Universe was absolutely phenomenal, and given all three of my other airing shows tend to maintain roughly the same level of quality every week (barring a climax episode of March), Universe’s success makes for a Week in Review success. Both Universe and After the Rain accomplished the difficult tasks of convincing me they could actually conclude their stories at satisfying points this week – Universe through its graceful return to its initial themes, and After the Rain through its continued detailing of what a glimmer of hope might look like for either of its heroes. In spite of this being a relatively light season in terms of raw show numbers, After the Rain, Universe, and March all fall so squarely into precisely My Jam territory that I can’t really complain. Not one, not two, but THREE melancholy character dramas about quietly unhappy people trying to reach out to each other. My cup runneth over with gentle sadness, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Let’s run this week down!

This week’s Laid Back Camp marked the commencement of the long-awaited Christmas camping trip, the trip that will likely carry us to the end of this series. Laid Back Camp has been a wonderfully executed low-key pleasure of the season, consistently offering some of the most immediately and diversely enjoyable episodes of anything I’m watching. This episode was no different, and even though it focused more on the “fun with friends” material than the contemplative Rin material, it was still just as easy to feel carried away by this trip’s wide open hills and valleys. The consistent long shots here did a terrific sense of evoking this campsite’s bracingly open fields, offering just a dash of Rin-style atmospheric appeal before diving into the goofy comedy. And in this particular episode, that goofy comedy was accompanied by food porn so tantalizing it pretty much forced me to go out for lunch. That lunch bill’s on you, Laid Back Camp.

And on the far end of the enjoyment spectrum, After the Rain once again offered plenty of beautiful suffering this week, as Kondo and Akira each languished in their own unique and poignantly illustrated anxieties. This week smartly followed up on last week’s introduction of Kondo’s successful novelist friend, who really puts Kondo’s own unhappiness in clear perspective. The contrast of Kondo’s friend describing how novels are “like a lover” for him, versus Kondo’s messy relationship with the passion that likely tore his marriage apart, was a painfully sharp illustration of the ambiguity of dreams. We applaud people for chasing wild dreams, but most people who chase such dreams will fail, and what’s left for them after that? I could easily relate to Kondo’s younger self as he implored his own aged back, asking to have his passion for writing somehow taken away. When you still have the passion but know you’ll never achieve the dream, that longing can feel like a curse.

The episode offered some hope at the end, in the form of its two neat metaphors: Kondo as the aged bookmark, and Akira as the hesitant swallow. Neither of these characters can truly resolve the anxieties that plague the other, so it felt right to me for them to frame their advice to each other in terms of these metaphors, which can convey the sentiments they feel without attaching it to the kind of tangible advice they’re incapable of offering. And with Akira encouraging Kondo to continue his writing, I’m actually starting to feel like this season could finish on a satisfying conclusion for this story. Neither of these characters need to find love or happiness – they just need to know love and happiness are still waiting for them, somewhere down the bend.

Moving back to the comfy stuff, March comes in like a lion pulled off another of its patented lateral arc leaps this week, jumping from the fatigued drama of Burnt Field all the way back to the resolution of Hina’s school bullying arc. This jump felt kinda clumsy in a structural sense, but I’ve come to accept that “clumsy in a structural sense” is a vice March has decided to never ever feel bad about. March is more of an episodic, many-season situational drama than a tightly structured dramatic sprint, where the individual episodes all offer their own rewards, and this episode was certainly full of rewards. Hina’s friend Chiho is still burdened by the scars of her experience, and her tormenter Takagi still hasn’t internalized the idea that it’s worth caring about other people, but both of those dangling edges are ultimately positive reflections of how March embraces the ongoing emotional complexity of all of its characters. The peace Hina arrived at in this episode still felt like a long-awaited and hard-fought victory; the luxury of falling asleep untroubled in the living room, your thoughts consumed by nothing but new sweets for the family shop.

And careening once more back towards the emotionally devastating stuff, A Place Further than the Universe pulled off what was easily its best episode since the first few, and in doing so went an extremely long way towards alleviating my fears about the show’s overall structure. The episodic travelogue style of Universe’s second half hasn’t really done anything for me, and I’d initially figured this structural shift meant the show itself didn’t value its initial focus on all that “intangible longing” stuff nearly as much as I did, but all those juicy ideas came roaring back this week. This episode’s articulation of Shirase’s fear of reaching her destination and not feeling any different cut to the core of Universe’s thematic resonance, serving as a natural last emotional hurdle before their final journey.

That unreachable something implied by the show’s title might only be valuable because it’s unreachable – if you actually reach it, you may find you’ve simply arrived at some other mundane place. In the face of this fear, Universe’s long-awaited counterpoint came from Mari, expressing her plain happiness at having made such good friends. “It’s the journey, not the destination” is a truism, but Universe has smartly and successfully illustrated an incredibly stark example of that truth, presenting its destination as “a reason for living” and letting the lives of these characters justify themselves.

All that, and also Shirase’s devastating “reunion” with her mother, along with some of the strongest lighting and direction of the second half. Alright Universe, you win this one.