Well at this point, if you’re reading this you’ve probably all seen it. So I’m not going to bother trying to explain what happened, especially as most of that is left up to interpretation anyway. My focus is on how I felt about the episode itself.

For starters, those of us who speculated that Fumiaki himself was the key were correct. For the ending the creators went with a fairly tried & true “time paradox” theory – the nut of it being that if Fumiaki met his younger self – let’s call them Fumiaki and Abe-sensei – it would cause a dimensional rift. This, as it turns out, is what allows the aliens to enter our dimension and mess over 2012 big-time. Through a chain of innocent events, Fumiaki and Abe-sensei meet at the school on the destined day – the rift opens, aliens come through, and that’s when it starts to get weird.

Apparently Fumiaki is one hell of a powerful telekinetic when the mood strikes him, if his stone-bending skills are any indication. After he and Abe-sensei touch and the aliens come through, Abe-sensei apparently rediscovers his telekinetic ability. At this point, my best guess as to what happens is that he uses Fumiaki’s spoon to fight off the aliens and seal the rift, sacrificing himself in the process – again, a result I expected after last week. Just how he was able to do that I’m not quite sure, but this is where things get really dodgy as far as time-travel theory is concerned. The future is apparently changed at last with Abe-sensei’s death – now 2012 is a bright, happy place and when Papa leaves the bunker, the bunker is now a tea shop. Except he seems to remember everything (I think) and so does Maya (I think, but with less confidence). Even more interestingly, she and Fumiaki are living together and possibly marries, and Papa apparently lives with them. Which means that one way or the other, Maya waited for Fumiaki to grow old enough not to be jail-bait and they ended up together. But if Fumiaki never returned in time, how did he get back to 1999 to fix the timeline? And how is it that even after the timeline was fixed, Papa and all the scientists were still in a bunker that didn’t exist when the outside world was “normal”? I have a headache…

Like I said – I won’t try too hard to analyze. It was certainly an interesting finale, loaded with tension and a sense of impending dread. I commented yesterday how nice it was that Giant Killing allowed itself time for a real epilogue, and I think that was sorely missing from this episode – in the mad rush to the finish line, there were only brief moments at the end to reflect on what happened. It was nice to hear that Fumiaki and Maya ended up together, though it would have been nice to have some context for that. And I hated to see Abe-sensei – for me, the funniest and most empathetic character in the series – meet a bad end, no matter how much I expected it. Still, it was incredibly consistent thematically. Fumiaki took a lot of criticism for his behavior early on, but he was fundamentally a decent man who chafed at always being manipulated at those around him. His “Keep living like that” to his younger self was a recognition that he was taking some control, at last. At least he went out a hero, and maybe it was the sight of him doing so that made Maya fall for him at last – though there were certainly signs she was already doing so…