Rating: A
In the days leading up to the airing of this episode, I engaged in a discussion on another site about whether or not this story actually needed the reincarnation angle. Could a story which eliminated that and Ai, and was just about ordinarily-gifted twins working their way through various aspects of the entertainment industry beginning when they were very young, still be successful? Honestly, I think so, especially if it still contained all of the insider perspective seen throughout this series. But it wouldn’t be Oshi no Ko. You couldn’t just change the character backgrounds and make a few other small tweaks and still have the same series, and the second part of this episode powerfully shows why.
Ironically, the first part of this episode somewhat deals with making these kinds of changes. A combination of Aqua getting the play ticket for Abiko and pushing Raida to take action, along with an assist from Yoriko in advising Abiko about meeting them halfway, led to the kind of direct communication between creator and script writer which should have happened from the beginning, essentially resolved the writing conflict. In fact, how well Abiko and GAO got in sync once they started hashing out the details, and how much fun they seemed to be having with it, was rather amusing. It certainly makes the script more challenging to perform, but as Kana and others suggest with their reactions to it, what true actor wouldn’t rise to this kind of challenge?
But this also creates an unexpected problem for Aqua. He’s not emotive by nature, so putting on a performance which requires him to project his emotions is going to be difficult for him. One telling scene happens when Aqua, on advice from Kana, tries to recall a time when he was happy. He can easily picture other people around him being happy, but not himself, so when he finally does smile, it still feels like just an imitation. But even that’s enough to set off the PTSD reaction that Kana had unwittingly set in motion moments before.
Kana, of course, had no way of knowing that the advice she relayed to Aqua about how child actors are taught to generate tears on command (i.e., to imagine their mother dying) was the absolute worst thing imaginable that she could have said to Aqua. We knew all along that Aqua had never let himself get over Ai’s death, and that he uses it as a driving force behind his actions even to this day, but the depth to which it still affected him emotionally – and how he unreasonably blames himself for not being able to stop it – was not as clear until now. He didn’t just witness her death and the violence which led to it first-hand; he experienced it in tactile and olfactory senses as well, and the way this episode shows him reliving that is masterfully devastating, both in its visuals and its use of dire, tense music. And maybe the saddest aspect of this is that the one person he could share this with – Ruby – is the person he most adamantly wants to distance from it. He has never felt he had a future in this life, but he still powerfully wants Ruby to have one.
Though Akane is an outsider to this whole scenario, her scenes here are no less important. Back in episodes 7 and 8, she showed an almost scary degree of intuition when it came to puzzling out the true character of a person, and that resurfaces again here. She had already considered the possibility that Ai might have secretly had a child, and now just learning that Aqua was haunted by a terrible childhood experience, combine with Aqua saying Ai’s name in his sleep, was enough for her to connect the dots on the possibility that Aqua (and by extension Ruby) were the secret love children she had once posited. Aqua’s only saving grace here is that Akane finds this scenario too fantastical to be fully credible, but she should know as well as anyone that truth can be stranger than fiction.
Some minor quality control issues in the artistry don’t deter one bit the impact this episode has, or how well the (now-translated) lyrics of the season’s OP fit. The effectiveness with which the series can deliver on its key scenes is one of the main reasons why this series is a top contender for the season’s best.
USA Anime 