[Fish Sandwich]

...and we're back! Kiramager was in an extra rough spot thanks to the hiatus, considering it only had 10(+1) episodes to work with, but amazingly, I think it managed to weather the clip show apocalypse far better than Zero-One did, thanks to a combination of a surprisingly large amount of cut scenes to slip in there, and an extremely talented cast of voice actors. Those Kira-Talk specials were genuinely quite fun!

But that's thankfully in the past now, and we can stop reliving the same events over and over again to move on to a brand new story about... Tametomo reliving the same events over and over again. Huh. I know I'm not the first to make this observation, but it's a heck of a coincidence that this is the plot we came back to. Cruel twists of fate aside, this is an episode about Tametomo, which pretty much immediately guarantees I'm going to love it. Spoiler alert: I loved it!

Somewhat out of the blue, this one is written by Tete Inoue, who is basically a complete enigma to me, and I believe was last seen writing a few episodes of Kyuranger? If I have my facts straight? I feel like it's worth pointing out when Arakawa isn't at the helm of an episode, but in this case, there's not much I can say from there. It's an episode of Kiramager, and it's not exceptional, but it's also quite good and certainly hits the spot after so long without a new episode.

These kind of time loop plots can get sluggish and frustrating when not handled properly, but this episode doesn't waste any time moving from beat to beat. Ironically given the entire concept, there's a great sense of progression to the story, with Tametomo going through the usual motions a lot quicker than I'd expect, which is a great show of characterization. Of course a strategically minded guy like him is going to figure out what's happening (more-or-less) right away, and of course he's going to immediately try all the obvious solutions to the dilemma. He's 75% of the way through the normal plot beats of this premise by only halfway through the runtime. The man knows his speedrunning strats! And that leaves the rest of the episode to mix things up just enough to feel like something more unique and creative, and the solution Tametomo eventually hits on is both hilarious and cool, with him forcing the monster into a stalemate and eventually depression by ruining the entire point of resetting time through taking the quickest, most effective possible course of action to defeat him in each loop.

Overall, it's nothing too complicated, but the simplicity probably works in the episode's favor. It eschews focus on just about anything that isn't Tametomo and the monster, with even Juuru only managing one quick bit of motivational speechifying. As part of the normal run of the show, I might be saying it's just okay, but considering how starving I've been for some Kiramager lately, I think an episode that's just okay is a great thing to have. And again, there's a certain synergy here between the real life context of this episode and its plot centered around managing to finally break free of a vicious cycle of repetition, so that kinda adds something too.