OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While Misaka looks for more details on 10032’s disappearance, Saten and the swim team girls get in touch with their friend who can do psychometry on animals, uncovering the codeword “Auribus oculi fideliores sunt”. Saten then tries to contact Misaka, being surprised that her number is already in her phone, and talks to Kuroko. Uiharu meets up with Misuzu, but the two are targeted by Kozaku, Baba’s colleague in MEMBER, in order to lure out Misaka. Kozaku blames her for attacking their bases to steal data, but Misaka only did that to defend her friends. Regardless, she uses her knowledge of Kuroko to guide her to saving Misuzu while Misaka saves Uiharu. It isn’t easy, as Kozaku’s ability allows her to make a goopy clone of herself to fight back, but she flees soon after. Kuroko is confused about how Misaka used her, but everyone’s fine so it’ll slide for now. In the end, the team concludes that Misaki is behind this and that the latin phrase is the name of the site Saten learned about Shadow Metal, but now the site is gone.

OUR TAKE

A Certain Scientific Railgun returns from its coronavirus induced break with another new episode!…right before at least another two weeks off before the next one, at least if we’re going off of the current sub release schedule. We’re actually up to date with the sub right now, with the eighth episode only just recently getting a release date next week. That probably means we’ll be getting a dub in the next two weeks, but who’s to say at this point. All of this (understandably tense) hubbub about the virus is halting a LOT of entertainment venues like theater, movies, theme parks, and even some TV including this show, so hopefully once things have died down we can get back to some normalcy.

As for the episode itself, it looks like Misaki’s removal of Misaka from her friend’s memories is starting to be worked around, as even making someone forget one of their friends can’t stop them from having that friend’s number (in Saten’s case), recognizing their mother (in Uiharu’s), or forgetting the feelings they have for that friend (in Kuroko’s). Because of this, I’m starting to wonder if maybe this wasn’t an actual step in the grand plan happening behind the scenes, but simply a diversion for Misaka to focus on while other more important things happen under her nose. Certainly possible, since it looks like even the members of MEMBER don’t seem to know what’s going on entirely. Speaking of which, Kozaku looks to be our new mini boss to beat now that Baba is out, and it seems she’ll be getting a bit more prominence and focus based on how she’s shown off in both the OP and the ED.

But at the moment, all the roads look to be leading to Misaki as the true mastermind of all of this, which is definitely looking like a likely conclusion considering she can manipulate memories and how much of the weirdness seen so far in this arc has been based on that. And yet we still have at least half a dozen episodes left IN this arc, so that makes me think this might be premature. We do have other characters to show off before it ends, but we also look to be finally having a showdown between Railgun and Mental Out in the next episode (whenever that comes out), so stay tuned and maybe we’ll finish this show before the year ends. At the very least they could finish the arc.

Score 7/10