OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In flashbacks, we see how Esther first met the Hishigatas, Mikihiko and his little sister Hirumi. The siblings plan to create a Level 6 Esper with their research, with Esther’s necromancy being a possible route. While she and Mikihiko don’t seem to gel, Hirumi takes a quick liking to her and the two become fast friends. She relates to Esther’s eagerness to please because she wants to help her brother as a test subject and makes Esther promise to help her complete what they need. However, Mikihito isn’t willing to use her, being an upstanding older brother. Instead, he and his partner are more likely to use teenage girls swamped in debt as guinea pigs until their mentally broken! Such a great guy.

Well, Hirumi is impatient to help out, and we soon learn the reason is that she has a terminal case of Tragic Backstory Disease. She can’t afford to wait until the tests are safe, so she decides to kill herself in order to become a prime test subject. In desperation, Esther suggests using necromancy to possibly take hold of her soul, though it would require putting a pseudo-soul in her body first, then placing her in one of the Coffin mechs. This seems to work at first, delighting a distraught Mikihiko, but Esther soon realizes it’s actually the pseudo-soul Taowu using her voice. She then kills all of their associates save for Esther, who she forces to stay put and help maintain her hold on Hirumi’s body until she can become a Level 6.

And then…somehow, Esther got away without mentioning any of this to Mikihito and went on the run, eventually running into Accelerator. In the present, she continues her ritual, collecting energy in a dagger she intends to use to free Hirumi’s body from Taowu’s control.

OUR TAKE

For an episode meant to fill in the blanks, I feel like we ended up with even more questions. We certainly learn more about the situation prior to this series of how Esther got involved with this creepy brother and sister team, but there’s still a LOT of fuzzy details about that which I expected we would get to. For one, who the heck are the Hishigatas and how did they put together this research group into Level 6 Espers? How did they know how to contact Esther? For that matter where the heck did Esther even come from and what about mentally violating down on their luck shoplifters sounded appealing to her? These seem like relatively easy things to just get out of the way, even if it might be done a little clunky, but I’d prefer clunky exposition of the essentials over simply not explaining them.

Though the big retroactive reveal, which I guess has completely slipped Esthers’ mind to explain, is that the Hirumi we’ve seen pose awkwardly next to Mikihito these past few episodes is actually NOT Hirumi, but Taowu! Which might have meant something if there was any sort of mystery around that OR any real focus on Hirumi prior to this. Not to mention there seem to be some scenes missing regarding how Esther got away from Taowu, somehow didn’t explain the situation to Mikihito (who said rather explicitly that if it wasn’t Hirumi’s soul in her body, than it wasn’t Hirumi). So based solely on the information given in this episode, this season’s plot should not be happening. I have to say that I have never seen an exposition episode end up breaking the plot of the story it was trying to exposit about.

But then again, we have another third of this season to go that MIGHT fill in the gaps here…but really, this was the time to do it and that time has now passed. Not that this was an all that remarkable story, to begin with, but I would probably take more pleasure seeing Accelerator knock everyone around to death than learning more about this whole Necromancy affair. And to my luck, it seems that is what we might be getting next episode now that we are returning to the present course of events. But honestly, I think I might be mentally checked out from this point on. Wake me up when Railgun starts I guess.

Score 3/10