Has there ever been a more schizophrenic, whiplash-inducing anime than Fumetsu no Anata e? It’s quite remarkable how wildly the tone swings, to the point where it’s almost hard to believe it’s all written by the same person. I can’t explain it. I don’t know if it’s on purpose or just the mangaka’s style asserting itself more than it did in Koe no Katachi. I do know that I can go from totally vested to bored to repulsed and all the way back again at the drop of a single episode. I don’t know how she does it, or why she does it. But it’s certainly distinctive.

All that is a long-form way of saying just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in. Like a light switch, the histrionics and absurdities were gone and we got a very restrained, genuinely thoughtful episode. There’s a core of something interesting to this series that all of Ooima’s excesses can never quite kill. And that core is Fushi. His eternal struggle is pathos incarnate, always getting that boulder to the top of the mountain only to have it tumble back down to the bottom.

Fushi is always (and that’s no hyperbole, it really is always) trying to do the right thing. And circumstances and the darkness and weakness of humanity are forever foiling him. It seems very natural, kill the parasite inside Izumi and let the rightful owner return to their body. But Mizuha pleads with him not to, and Fushi’s hand is once again stayed. And the thing is, when Mizuha describes how much better this bogus mama is better than the real one, how can he argue? The real Izumi was a terrible parent – she admits as much herself. But she’s still Mizuha’s mother, and the thing inside her body isn’t.

All this is complicated immeasurably by the fact that Mizuha is not really Mizuha. At least some of the time. Izumi is a “fully merged” Nokker (to use terms coined by Bon and Fushi). To wit, the person is dead and the Nokker is effectively a replacement. But Mizuha is “half-merged” – the real owner is still in there, and control passes back and forth at the Nokker’s will. Izumi committed the sin of wishing she were dead, which is effectively a “let the right one in” invitation to a Nokker. And let me be clear – a parent threatening suicide is child abuse, no more and no less. Izumi was indeed a rotten mother.

Does she have excuses? Sure, some of them even valid to an extent. She was raised in a cult, and her father tried to marry her off and turn her into a breeder for its sake. She finally fled, and thought she’d escaped. But the nice guy she wound up with turned out to be part of the cult too. And Izumi spent her entire life basically taking her frustrations out on Mizuha, even as the Nokker inside her continued to eat away at her memory. And now, after hearing her daughter blatantly argue to leave her dead so she could live with her replacement, Izumi seems to have pretty much given up the ghost (pun intended).

As usual, it’s going to be Fushi left holding the bag here, as usual searching for the right answer in a situation where one right answer doesn’t exist. The Nokker-led Guardian cult is nesting under the city, Izumi is gone (possibly for good), and Satoru is clearly not much interested in providing any support. Bon is really Fushi’s only steadfast ally who can help – though Yuki is certainly steadfast, and seems to be getting a better handle on the current scenario and how he can impact it.