Closing time is approaching, friends. With only one real week left in the winter season, all my seasonal contenders were wrapping things up for the endgame this week, offering a mix of climactic battles and shocking reveals and various other animated delights. The Magnificent Kotobuki sent like five hundred goddamn planes into the air to blow each other up, while Kemurikusa finally unveiled the true nature of its world, and Run with the Wind simply maintained its signature excellence. It was a week of winter 2019, in short, and I’m happy to move beyond the general vagueries and get down to the details with you all. Let’s run down one more week in anime!

It was at last the time for explanations in this week’s Kemurikusa, as we learned the origins of Wakaba, the sisters, and even the red root all at the same time. Apparently, Rin and her sisters always had the right of it – they were the only “humans” here, at least collectively, whereas Wakaba has always been some kind of celestial architect of new planets. The explanations presented here were as clean and concise as I could have hoped, with essentially every variable of the main plot emerging naturally from  Riri not wanting to lose Wakaba. At the same time, the fact that this episode was so entirely dedicated to flashback meant it didn’t really offer Kemurikusa’s usual tonal and dramatic appeals; it was a necessary episode, but far more functional than dramatically satisfying. I absolutely loved the flourish at the ending though – portraying Wakaba’s departure and Riri’s decision as a series of profile shots playing out on the bottom screen actually turned the ED’s image of the sisters into the punchline of a story we didn’t even know about. Playing with our expectations of what is assumed to be an aesthetic flourish or dramatically meaningless is always a pretty great trick!

It was King’s turn to take the stage in this week’s Run with the Wind, followed by the first leg of Kakeru’s stunning contribution. No one was dying of sickness or bleeding profusely or falling apart in some other way this time – instead, both of these runners offered their own demonstrations of Run with the Wind’s stunningly acute ear for internal character voice, along with very different takes on the episode title, “Embrace Your Loneliness.”

In King’s case, his run was an overt, conscious reflection on how contributing to this team had helped him come to terms with his fundamental unhappiness.  Though King hasn’t really received much focused material relative to the rest of this team, his segment felt satisfying purely as a self-contained little character vignette; this show’s writing is just that specific and efficient, able to sell a personal arc in just under ten minutes.

As for Kakeru, the title took a very different and far happier meaning, as he surrendered into the strange and thrilling isolation of being a clean instrument of athletic struggle. Many episodes ago, Nico mentioned how when he’s running, everything else disappears, and he feels clean for the first time. This Kakeru segment attempted to directly convey the felt experience of that phenomenon, as the outside world faded entirely, and Kakeru was left alone with his wandering thoughts, even his body more a vehicle he was directing than a part of himself. If the first half were a tribute to Run with the Wind’s stellar script, this second half demonstrated its aesthetic holism with equal grace. God damn this show.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure recovered somewhat from last week’s letdown, though this still wasn’t a particularly great episode. To be honest, it seems likely that we’re not going to be getting any more “truly great JoJo episodes,” at least in visual terms, until we start hitting the big tentpole battles. Running a production for three seasons straight is a nearly impossible feat for any studio, and it’s clear at this point that David Productions have run through whatever buffer they once possessed, resulting in increasingly still and talking head-heavy episodes. That said, while the execution of this episode disappointed me, I quite enjoyed the relationship between our two villains, and “I’LL CUT OUT MY OWN GODDAMN TONGUE, THAT’LL SHOW YOU” is about as quintessentially JoJo as they come. I hope these animators get some rest soon, but this story is still plenty of fun.

Kotobuki and their allies made a grand stand against Isao in this week’s The Magnificent Kotobuki, with truly disastrous effects. Though I’ve consistently had issues with the larger strokes of this strangely plotted production, this episode was able to hone in on one of the things Mizushima does best: crafting tiny little internal conflicts within larger battles, complete with their own tempo, stakes, and at times even genre. This sprawling battle was full of such mini-conflicts, whether it was Kylie’s rival bickering with her allies, Kate and Leona seeking closure, the grand sacrifice of the Porokka flagship, or Kylie herself attempting to avenge Ol’ Sab. It was also the series’ most visually ambitious battle yet, with literally hundreds of planes in flight, and plenty of shots that worked hard to convey the scale of this battle. Finding small dramatic throughlines within a messier scrimmage Mizushima has been putting to use for years, most impressively in the Girls und Panzer film, and it was a delight to see him expressing that talent once again. Kotobuki lacks the tightness of design that lifted Girls und Panzer from a fun adventure to a genuine classic, but it’s still a very fun adventure all the same.

And finally, the penultimate episode of Mob Psycho 100 was just as spectacular as I’d hoped, largely for reasons I hadn’t even expected. The first stage of Mob’s battle with the boss was indeed a gorgeous animation spectacle, but I was even more impressed with the efficient and thematically charged Serizawa mini-arc. At an earlier point in this series, Serizawa would have stood as a pretty sharp parallel for Mob – an isolated and confused young esper who ends up finding confidence through dedicating himself to a conman higher power. But at this point, Mob has gained the perspective necessary to not just sympathize with Serizawa’s position, but confidently declare exactly where he went wrong.

The allure of surrendering your agency to a charismatic leader in the face of a dehumanizing world that denies your validity feels like it sums up the horrors of the modern world in a nutshell, and I felt this episode did a very sharp job of both acknowledging the valid feelings that led Serizawa to this point, while also rigorously emphasizing that being hurt in the past doesn’t mean the world must validate your pain, or that you can surrender the responsibility of judging your own actions to another. And right after that, to underline Mogami’s acknowledgment that some people truly can’t be reached, Mob at last faced off with an opponent who isn’t just scared or insecure or misguided, but genuinely dedicated to unleashing cruelty on the world. We’re watching Mob develop all the facets of a responsible, mature morality right before our eyes.