© 大今良時・講談社／不滅のあなたへＳ３製作委員会

It’s never a good sign when the narrator of the recap announces that a character is going to try and take care of a problem “once and for all,” and we’re only on Episode 6 of a couple of dozen. I’m sorry, Fushi, but when Tonari wistfully wondered if everyone would truly be able to live peacefully in this new world, that was a literary device that we in the business call “foreshadowing.” You won’t be able to bubble-tea your way out of this upcoming mess so easily.

That is especially going to be true when our hero, the sweet little idiot of an immortal god-being that he is, decides that his best plan for proving the peacefulness of the world to Tonari is to convince her that Mizuha and her ilk are one-hundred percent cool, despite the generations of fraternizing with the Nokkers. Oh, and the murder that Mizuha committed a few days ago. And the fact that her mother is both a ghost and a creepy living doppelganger all at the same time. Yes, this is certainly the very definition of “peaceful” that you’re looking for, good buddy.

In all seriousness, I actually enjoy the utterly insane contrast of Fushi’s Funtime Occult-Club Adventures and the reality of the Orb Gang’s situation. Fushi earnestly presenting Tonari with Mizuha’s handmade hair-tie is exactly the sort of thing that would work in an after-school special starring regular human children who weren’t all inextricably connected by the millennia-long journey of an immortal Orb-Thing. Tonari is nothing but honest, though, and she makes the very reasonable point that it’s very weird for her to act like it isn’t just a little crazy to become besties with Mizuha after everything Hayase and her descendants have gotten up to. This is, after all, a world where reincarnated souls and inherited memories are very real and tangible. Tonari isn’t just beefing with Mizuha because her horoscope app gave her a bad reading after breakfast that morning. She watched all of her friends get killed by Nokkers a thousand years ago. You can’t blame her for being slow to trust the latest incarnation of the world’s most problematic friend of the Nokkers, can you?

Fushi is reminded of how impossible it is to ignore the Nokkers when Bon alerts him to at least one other doppelganger that is out and about, except this one has taken over the identity of a little girl named Mimuri. Poor Fushi’s first instinct is to lure the kid to a construction site and straight up stab her with a sword, which is another moment of ludicrous contrast that actually works rather well. It would be nonsense for a regular human to view both brutal sword murder and cutesy high-school arts and crafts as a reasonable and permanent solution to the impossible Nokker problem, but Fushi is an Orb-Thing who wasn’t even fully capable of sentient thought and speech for a good long while. He’s a god with the mind of a well-meaning but very overburdened kid, and all he wants is to make a paradise for his loved ones.

One nice thing about the Nokkers being back is that we have a proper, tangible threat for Fushi and Co. to deal with, and I love how the Mimuri dilemma opens up the whole can of worms all over again. The scene where the little girl takes Fushi’s sword and stabs herself to sic Mimuri’s family on Fushi is a great little slice of horror that reminds us that the Nokkers really are monstrous, and not to be trifled with. It reminded me a little of Higurashi: When They Cry, which is not bad company to be in.

All of this, and we haven’t even gotten to The Black One coming back in the form of a smarmy little brat with all of Fushi’s powers and a penchant for soda floats. It’s a great turn that gives The Black One a much more direct role in the plot and a definitive character arc. Beyond all of the Nokker exposition that we get - they’re germs now, as it turns out - I’m mostly just interested in how The Tiny Black One is set to become a completely normal human in just a few years. What a way for the god of this universe to go out. At the very least, abandoning his immortal powers and memories will give TTBO the chance to experience life from a truly human perspective, which is something that Fushi is still trying to sort out, especially the whole matter of “love.”

Now, obviously, it would be foolish to say that romantic love and/or physical attraction is an absolutely fundamental component to every human being’s experience, but love and attraction are very much foundational threads of the whole tapestry of our culture and history. Whatever forms these feelings take become vital, instrumental cornerstones of the people who experience them. Fushi hasn’t yet figured out what they mean to him, exactly - if they mean anything at all. Mizuha is more than happy to teach Fushi everything she knows about love, as it turns out, and I’m sure that there is absolutely nothing about this plan that could go wrong.

**Episode Rating: **

• To Your Eternity Season 3 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 BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast. *