So many Fruits Basket episodes are a tale of two halves.  It’s a reflection of what an all-or-nothing series this is.  I think the best way to sum up my take on it is to say that I can think of no other series which I would assign an overall mixed grade that was so rarely mediocre.  Furuba is usually either really good (sometimes great) or almost unwatchable for me, and very rarely in-between for any length of time.  And the penultimate episode was a textbook example.

I’m not going to pretend I give a rat’s ass (pun intended) about Yuki and Machi, not even at this late date.  As anime romances go I think if you looked up “bland” in the Oxford English Dictionary, they’re the couple you’d see.  It’s a trifle sad that Takaya treats this as if it’s some sort of soaring conclusion, and Machi’s “I’m so grateful people like you exist” line (I threw up in my mouth a little) is emblematic of everything that’s banal and exasperating about how she writes Yuki as a character.  But mostly I was just watching the clock and waiting for it to be over.

As for the Sohma estate sequence, well…  I suppose the best that can be said is that Akito and Shigeru deserve each other.  This was like the one last hurrah for every annoying character to be annoying, but Akito is a lot to take for me.  Even if she could bring herself to say she was sorry, that wouldn’t come close to making amends (which I still content she should be eager to do legally if she truly is contrite) for the atrocities she’s committed.  There is a sadness to seeing the pact officially break, with Yuki naturally being the last to be released, but not because of Akito (or Yuki).  It’s because of the sentiment which went into it in the first place, which she’s a twisted perversion of.

That, thankfully, is where the A-part gives way, and we get down to some serious Furuba emotional barrage.  There’s one couple in this series that matters (well, two if you count Hiro and Kisa), and their interactions elevate the material in spite of being a bit heavy-handed at times.  Kyou is the one who’s suffered most from this nightmare, so it only makes sense to me that he should want to get as far away as possible now that he can.  I think he’ll be able to return one day and find some peace where it all went down, but he needs to reset.  And of course to test himself, as he said.

It says something for Kyou that he was willing to leave Tohru behind – for a while – knowing this was the right thing for him.  But it says something about her that she won’t have a minute of it.  They dithered about for three seasons but now that they’ve declared, the two of them aren’t messing around.  Which I love, for the record – seize the day kids, because as the two of them and the real star of the episode know, you can never tell what’s going to happen.  Tohru of course knows her mother well enough to be sure she’s right about her final words, and I hope Kyou trusts that enough to believe it.  But it is sad that he’ll never know the full truth of it.  Poor kid just can’t buy a break.

I think at this point it’s redundant to say Sawashiro Miyuki was fantastic, because she pretty much always is.  And there are a lot of series that couldn’t get away with her dialogue as Kyoko here, especially in the situation.  But Fruits Basket can, because emotional restraint is not in its vocabulary.  This was a beautiful sort of sadness, hearing Kyoko’s thoughts in this moment – mostly of her child of course, but also of Katsuya.  But the irony of it is that she got a measure of peace seeing Kyou’s face, even if unwittingly giving him an adolescence of guilt and shame in the process.  And whatever your beliefs, seeing her together with Katsuya (who finally gets a line of spoken dialogue, uttered by Hosoya Yoshimasa) feels like the least the poor woman deserves as she leaves the stage.