Here’s a hint for the gang at TMS Entertainment – if you want to have a suspenseful sequel announcement after a series finale, don’t subtitle your show “First Season”.  This news doesn’t even qualify as a poorly-kept secret, so unsurprising is it.  That means this episode wasn’t really subject to the usual pressures of a series finale, because it wasn’t one in any real sense – just a placeholder.  But the unusual circumstances surrounding Fruits Basket mean it was subject to a different sort of pressure.

Interestingly, while generally following the same outline as the first adaptation (with changes, but not a ton of broad plot and placement ones) Fruits Basket 2019 chose to embark on virgin territory in its first season finale rather than at the start of its second.  This is probably a smart move, because I imagine viewers with long memories will have their appetites whetted here – a solid majority of what we saw this week is new material to the anime side.  That’s what this reboot is all about in the end – going where the first series couldn’t go because the antipathy Takaya Natsuki felt (and feels) towards Akitarou Daichi snuffed out what likely would have been an eventual sequel.

This was a fitting way to end the season, really, because it was a pretty good working demonstration of everything that works about this show and everything that doesn’t.  As always, Furuba is better – much better – when it’s about something.  And something important to the plot.  The A-part was as canon as it gets and the episode benefitted from that – it was some of the strongest material of the run.  But Furuba is also about huge gulfs between its Jekyll and Hyde sides – and the B-part definitely highlighted that fact.

There hasn’t been enough Kyou in this version generally speaking, and I fear that may have robbed some of the emotional impact of the last two episodes for those who don’t have previous exposure to the material.  In a very real sense Kyou is the essential character in Fruits Basket – the whole Sohma premise more or less rests on his life experience.  And his relationship with Shisho is crucial to understanding who he is.  Uchida Yuuma has stepped up nicely in the finale arc and Morikawa Toshiyuki was an excellent choice for Shisho – all the more crucial as the casting for this remake has not been unreservedly successful.

As for the B-part though, that’s another matter.  It certainly was plot-relevant, so that’s not an issue.  But any Kagura is too much, and she was in full on “all-time worst anime characters” mode here.  And the fact is, I’ve always found Yuki about as exciting as an ice cube sandwich.  It’s not TMS’ fault – manga, 2001, 2019, it doesn’t matter, he just leaves me utterly cold.  In a sense Yuki has the thankless job of the trio plot-wise, and Takaya certainly doesn’t stint on developing him.  It’s just that none of it could ever make me feeling anything towards him apart from the moments when he pisses me off for being such a douchebag towards Kyou.

As for Easter eggs, well, they were certainly right there in the open with no effort to make new viewers hunt them down.  That couple in the high school we’ll talk about later, and then there’s Rin (Toyasaki Aki), who Hiro-kun goes to visit in the hospital in a scene that leave no doubt she’ll be heard from again next year.  The last thing Furuba needs is more characters (never mind Sohmas), but we’re only a third of the way through the story more or less – patience will be tested as we wait for the wheel of plot to rotate back around to the characters that actually work.

What a strange experience it was, going back to this franchise again after so many years away.  I still don’t know how much the difference in the way it connected with me is because Fruits Basket changed, and how much because I did – of course there’s some of both.  You can’t go back, that much is clear – I’ll never be the same person who had that experience watching this series the first time.  But as we venture into new ground, less ingrained in my memory than what Akitarou covered, the experience is going to totally change yet again.  I’ll go into the second season curious, modestly hopeful, but not supremely confident – Furuba could always be an awkward sort of series, and adaptations whose main goal is faithfulness are not always the most successful ones.