[FairyKing]

I was holding off judgement on the "all just a dream" reveal until I saw this episode, and now... yeah, I like it! It was a very risky move by the writers, but I love what this premonition does to the story and to Baku as the protagonist. IMO it actually makes the crushing defeat in the previous episode feel more meaningful, not less, because there was no comeback, no last-minute turnaround, no way Baku somehow managed to make things work out. He just lost!

And now he has to move forward knowing that if he doesn't prevent that premonition in time, it will happen in the real world too. Even the way he acts seems like this really lit a fire under him (shoutout to Ryutaro Imai for showing that so well, especially in the final scene of gathering his team). It's like if in the beginning he was in the dark, blindly following orders and chasing whispers of information, then he started to show sparks of independence and demanding answers, and now he's ignited into a flame, setting his own mission in open rebellion against CODE, and while there's still a lot he doesn't know, he also has knowledge no one else does.

There's a also some really neat symbolism between waking up from a dream and breaking free from a lie. If everything he did under CODE was him being lied to and used, a "dream" in the metaphorical sense, what better way to emphasize that in Zeztz's context than by making it a literal dream? And what better way to show him finally breaking free from their control than by waking up?