To Your Eternity Season 2

Episode 6

I have to say that, even though it isn't a very high bar to clear, I've really been enjoying the fact that this current arc of To Your Eternity has consistently been able to maintain a quality level of “Mostly pretty decent, if you ignore the visuals!” While this current Bon-centric arc is far from the best thing the series has ever produced, it's introduced some genuinely fascinating new elements to the TYE universe, which has gotten me more invested in the story than I have been in quite some time. Just make sure that you're definitely able to ignore the show's rough visuals, because…yeah. They're still rough.

Still, I can't complain too much when the show is making good on its promise to explore Fushi's evolving relationships with his companions, the concepts of love and attraction, and even the way Fushi relates to the different bodies he inhabits (also, as a note: I've struggled with how to be consistent with Fushi's gender, but given how much the character has claimed to identify most with his male form, not to mention the conventions of the subtitles themselves, I'm going to go ahead and stick with male pronouns unless the series gives me reason to do otherwise). Sure, it isn't as if Fushi has made much progress in regards to truly understanding the nuances of his own wants and desires, since they're actively growing and changing day by day, but it is very interesting to see how the wills of the humans whose bodies Fushi is borrowing have been affecting Fushi's own disposition. Kahaku doesn't make a great case for himself this week, what with how creepy and handsy he gets after confessing his love to a very clearly disintegrated/panicked Fushi, but it gets even worse when Fushi points out that Parona would definitely have hard feelings towards the reincarnation of the woman who ruined her life and tortured her to death.

I'm slightly less captivated by all of the drama between Bon and the Church of Bennett this week, which is unfortunate considering that it takes up so much of this episode's runtime. This is mostly because, number one, I still don't care much for Bon as a character, and number two, the guys from the Church of Bennett make for better villains on paper than they do in practice. Like, yes, betraying Fushi's trust and then entombing him in molten iron is a deliciously wicked thing for our new antagonists to do, but in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand-and-Twenty-Two, an anime needs to have some kind of twist on the old “Devious Clergy of the Obviously Evil Church” trope. I really dug The Executioner and Her Way of Life, for instance, but I wouldn't have had nearly as much patience for those cliches if it wasn't for the way that series used them to put a spin on even more dated isekai-anime cliche (also, it helped that the protagonists were a cute couple of lesbian murder goddesses).

Plus, scenes like Fushi getting horrifically burned and psychologically broken would have had so much more impact if the show's visuals didn't fail it so consistently. Don't even get me started on the failed “drama” of Todo's fake-out death. That stabbing scene looked so comically unfinished and bloodless that the only assumptions I could make were either that Todo was definitely not dead at all, or that TYE's quality control had completely broken down. I guess it's technically a positive that the answer was the former and not the latter, but it still makes for lame television.

Look, I don't expect every single anime to look Chainsaw Man good. Hell, some of the best anime of the season—Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury and Akiba Maid War, to be specific—have recently put out their weakest looking episodes by far, but you don't see me complaining, because their stories are so damned good that I can easily overlook some animation shortcomings. As it stands, To Your Eternity's story is a wildly inconsistent mess of high highs and low lows, which means that I don't expect it to rise above being “merely okay, on average” any time soon.

Rating:

To Your Eternity is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.