As I said last week, “a story not making sense can totally work if the writing embraces it”. But there is an inherent flaw with that approach, and that flaw is endings. If all the ether isn’t materialized into something comprehensible by the time a show ends, we have no idea what we were just watching. Or why. That’s not the worst thing that could happen, but it ain’t great. And it’s why a lot of series that follow this template fall apart in the third act. They try and pull it together, but they never really had the chops to do it.

Does Sayonara Lara? Search me. What I know is that I still don’t really understand what it’s trying to do or how. Maybe having the Hans Christian Andersen template to go on is an advantage. It’s pretty clear that to whatever extent it’s remaking “The Little Mermaid” it’s the original that’s the model, not the Disney musical. That may give us some hints about where it’s headed (it’s been a very long time since I had any contact that that story, though) but in the end, this thing seems mostly original. I do know that Andersen’s ending is almost universally hated (IYKYK), though whether that will guide the writer’s hands here I have no idea.

Take Lisa for example. What does she want? She keeps parroting that Lara needs to find true love to capture her light, and save her mer-family. But then she says she’ll never give Lara to the humans, and shows up to “persuade” Mari to give her back. Am I nuts in seeing a pretty big contradiction with Lisa here? It seems to me that human and mermaid interests can never truly overlap – that’s one of the themes of the story. Lara can’t find true love with a single human (be they man or woman) and live happily ever after. Not and save her family anyway. In almost every mythology the relationship between humans and merfolk is fundamentally antagonistic.

For now, Lisa convinces Mari to convince Lara to come live with her. The fact that Lara’s body is breaking down and Lisa knows it is doing most of the heavy lifting here. Again though, what is Lisa’s long game? As she says herself the potion is basically a band aid. But Mari is just trying to do the right thing. Of course once Lara leaves (without her phone) both girls are miserable. And Luca too, though as is often the case with this series he largely disappears after one focus episode. Mari focuses on her boxing tournament (I was just in Zeze today as it happens – but I keep missing out on the “Lara” Keihan train) and Luca has no means of contacting Lara, so he turns his attention to Mari, who has nothing to offer him but her usual hostility.

That said, when Lara finally caves and decides she wants to go back to the human world – where she’s come to feel very much at home – it’s Luca she calls because his is the only number she has. She’s on the ferry (along with Lisa and Kouta) back from visiting her family on Okishima. She borrows an old fisherman’s phone and when Luca reminds her that Mari’s tournament finals are going on, Lara’s fish dagger causes a huge wave and makes it possible for her to go. Gonna be a hell of a job to tow that boat, though.

Well, this is all fine I guess. I still don’t know if Lara’s light is going to be love in the conventional sense, or who with. Luca is pretty clearly a third wheel here but even if Mari is #1 in Lara’s mind, it doesn’t feel like “true love” in the romance sense. Maybe familial love is enough, and Lara will have to decide which family she truly loves. Or maybe her love for the human world is her light – saving the merfolk with that would certainly be ironic. Will the ending follow the Andersen model, discard it altogether, or be some sort of hybrid? We’ll find out soon enough, but it seems like Sayonara Lara has left itself an awful lot to do in the time it has left.