Celestial Method

Episode 12

Where do you go when the story ends? Back to the beginning.

The last time we saw the cast of Celestial Method, they were in the Observatory in the dead of winter watching a meteor shower – and Noel vanish. Now all of a sudden, Nonoka's in the car with her dad and a slew of boxes, driving from Tokyo to the town where she lived before her mother's death. Wait, what? Don't worry, Nonoka is as confused as we are. Her dad thinks she's been dreaming, but she's convinced that she's gone back in time...especially since when the car emerges from a tunnel and the town becomes visible, there is no saucer in the sky. Why she is so certain that time has been reset rather than that she had a very realistic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-style dream isn't quite clear, but it may have something to do with the fact that she remembers everything about the town, which shouldn't be the case if she's just now arriving. Unfortunately, for everyone else, this is her first time back in seven years. They only remember her as a seven-year-old and no one knows anything at all about Noel or the saucer.

While this is a bit of a corny approach to storytelling, it is, at least in literary terms, much less of a cop-out than if they had in fact gone with the whole “it was a dream” idea. Resetting time allows for us to see how everyone would have grown up naturally over the past seven years, without the traumas caused by the saucer's arrival and all of the small details of life in a town with a weird sparkly thing in the sky. We can see that there are many fewer tourists, so Koharu isn't nearly as busy as she was before. Yuzuki and Souta are on good terms and clearly fairly close, drastically reducing Yuzuki's obnoxious factor and making Souta more willing to speak his mind. And as for Shione? She also is much calmer and walking around without her headphones, but there are some other key differences that are only barely touched on in this episode, presumably being saved so that the show has a reason to be thirteen episodes long. What we can really gather from this reset, however, is that Noel did, in fact, grant their wish. Everyone is happier, calmer, and able to pick up their friendship where it left off when Nonoka had to move away. Her mother's still dead, because Noel's more a djinn than a god, but the gang is well set up to go back to being friends forever. The problem is, Nonoka can't forget Noel, and her old friends clearly are a bit worried about her sanity. In a way that's actually a fairly familiar aspect of the story for people in rural areas meeting someone who's been in the city, but more worrying is the fact that these memories of Noel could in fact undermine the successful carrying out of their wish. Would that call her back again? Will Nonoka try and get everyone to perform the ritual again in order to regain Noel? Much as I like the character, I kind of feel like that would take away from the strength of the story, which would seem to imply that we have to move on from bad or upsetting events, because otherwise you end up with Yuzuki and Shione as they were during most of the previous episodes. So I'm feeling very conflicted about where this story could go in the next episode, as well as to how it is going to end.

As for this penultimate offering, it is both a bit confusing and disheartening. Why can't Nonoka just be happy that her wish came true? Is it because when one is granted we immediately supplant it with another, forever seeking some nebulous happiness that must be better than the one we just were granted? It's hard to say, but as of the events of this week, I'm kind of wishing that Celestial Method had left it to our imaginations and just ended with episode eleven.

Rating: B

Celestial Method is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rebecca Silverman is ANN's senior manga critic.