Sigh, another short comment that started running out of control at Chizumatic.
Edit: fixed episode #
The episode is kind of confusing in that it picks up an hour or two after the end of ep. 1. Yumiko apparently hightailed it again; Koyomi and Misa have gone back to Misa’s place and Koyomi explains how and why she came to be there. After they talk, Koyomi goes back out to search for Yumiko, although Misa warns her that she could really die if she gets hurt here. Now I have to explain that…
It’s all spoilerish, so it’s below the fold.
Ok, Present Day. Misa shows Koyami some neat “ghosts” and says that they are all basically “ghostscripts”; programs written to create a ghost or simulation (think of it as magic VR). After some more confusing and ridiculous-sounding magical background, she then talks Koyomi into doing a favor. It seems that a program of hers that she wrote six years ago has been hacked and is being used to loose magical calamities on the city. But she doesn’t remember the admin password, so she’s written a ghostscript of herself and the house at that time. She talks Koyomi into entering it via VR to find out what the password is.
Needless to say, that doesn’t make a bit of sense. How can anything be in the script except what she puts in it? How can the password be there? (First person to say “it’s magic” gets shot. If she could magically “recover” the password in the script, she could just as easily do it any other way. Which means that either all this is bad writing by the author, who hasn’t thought any of it out; he’s just going with “ah, it’s cool, and nobody cares.” Or Misa knows it’s BS, and she’s tricking Koyomi into time traveling. I’m going with the latter theory.
Another problem is that if this were actually a “mental” visitation via ghostscript, we wouldn’t be seeing Misa, et. al. separate from Koyomi — nothing could exist that Koyomi wasn’t experiencing. But we do. Well, the script might run, but none of it would make any difference. In particular, Koyomi couild not actually save Yumiko from the big bad — yet that’s the whole premise behind ep. 1 and this ep. 6. The fact that it isn’t working that way (and I suspect Misa understands this) means that Koyomi is physically in the past.
Counter argument: Yumiko has no memory of meeting Koyomi in the past. Strong evidence that the script is just a script and it really is a VR / magic way of retrieving the password…ep.1 is all Magic Reality (MR instead of VR). It also explains why Misa past doesn’t make it a point to save the password for Misa present. This isn’t the real Misa and it wouldn’t work.
But if it’s just a script, then why did Koyomi head out to save Yumiko? It’s not real…
That bit of confusion is throwing a spanner in my theories; originally I thought Misa’s warning to Koyomi of the dangers of running into the big bad was because she knew Koyomi was really here. So did Misa in the present know that as well? She had to, which means if the time-travel theory is is correct, she lied to Koyomi and tricked her into going. Forgetting a password is one thing. I could even go with “she wrote it down and still lost it” But this is getting convoluted. Is it real or is it Memorex?
Also, in ep.1, didn’t we see Koyomi walking around with her brother arguing about magic? Not her brother as he is now, but as he was then. That’s not making sense under either theory.
Either they’re going to have to come up with some brilliant explanations for these contradictions, or, as I really suspect, the writers don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
