This week Kyoukai no Kanata decided to start facing up to some of the loose ends it dropped during the Hollow Shadow arc. One of them, Sakura’s murky quest for revenge, was more or less fully dealt with. After a little bit of action, it became clear that a) she was totally outclassed by Mirai and b) she wasn’t so much hell-bent on revenge as she just needed an outlet for her grief. It was fairly refreshing how they wrapped things up quickly and didn’t force the miscommunications any longer than they had to.

Too, the heavy drama was nicely moderated by a good deal of banter and comedic interaction in the earlier half. Hiromi and Akihito forcing each other to listen to salaryman yaoi audio was a hoot, and Mirai’s quirks, if a bit random, seem to gel together into this whole image of a character who’s got an impulsiveness that prevents them from every escaping her comedic level of superpoverty. If nothing else, it’s a very tried-and-true character type, one that worked very well for Ban and Ginji in Get Backers.

The worst part of the episode, by far, was the somewhat abrupt banking turn the plot took after Sakura was defeated, as everything has apparently been going according to some ill-defined plan of the villains’ at this point. That the organization is making a ploy to kill Mirai is a notable plot point, but the details of their scheme and the way they shoehorned in a very weaksauce title drop at the end were definite evidence of some issues with the script. If this is how the second half is going to go (and it doesn’t have to; for all I know this arc could be resolved in a week’s time), then they might as well have just skipped the serious story entirely and had the cast getting themselves into freestyle ramen eating competitions.