Things are certainly escalating now that the second cour has started! The episode starts after some days have passed from Kagari’s disappearance and we learn she hasn’t been found despite the groups’ best efforts. The lab members seem out of sorts with Suzuha being particularly affected.
Due to not knowing what to do now, Suzuha and Daru contact Maho to talk about creating a time leap machine. Daru seems to be pressured by Suzuha in this case, but she’s very disappointed by Rintarou’s action since it seems he has no intention to prevent World War III. This part was nice to break the tension as Maho was looking badly sleep-deprived and she felt embarrassed afterwards to be seen that way.
After they hang up the phone call Daru and Suzuha discuss options and although Daru is still optimistic about Rintarou’s involvement in Suzuha’s original quest, she’s reluctant to accept his point of view since Rintarou’s disinterest has been going for a while.
Either way their discussion ends when Daru leaves for the hospital to visit Fubuki who supposedly collapsed. There he runs into the rest of the gang and he’s flustered to see Yuki. While they’re there, they run into Leskinen who is in Japan for some reason that isn’t really disclosed, but he ends up talking to Rintarou for a while. It’s pretty suspicious he’s there, but I guess the reason will probably emerge later. He lets Maho know he ran into Rintarou and she’s surprised.
She shows Amadeus-Kurisu the picture and she then starts discussing with Kurisu the idea of the time machine that she and Daru had talked about earlier. Kurisu’s responses are pretty interesting, but it makes sense that a scientist would want to build it, even if they would hesitate to use it. This gave Maho some food for thought.
The episode goes back to Suzuha and she found Kagari’s toy gift lying outside the lab. She realizes then that before disappearing, Kagari went to the lab and she announces out loud that she’s going to shower. She runs the shower and then an intruder breaks in. The moment is pretty tense as we learn pretty fast that it was a trap set by Suzuha to catch the intruder which she assumed was watching. The helmet person turns out to be Kagari, which I honestly didn’t expect at first! But I realized that this is probably a sort of uniform used by the organization they’re closing in on.
Kagari’s whole demeanor seems changed and very aggressive. She demands Suzuha to hand over the gift and they fight for a while, which was also pretty surprising. Eventually Suzuha is able to pin her down in a hold but then Daru arrives back and Kagari is able to run away.
They theorize a little about who could be behind this whole thing and Suzuha conveniently remembers now that all her comrades were tortured by a professor in the future, so I suppose things are tied back to this organization. She also remembers that Kagari repeated she could hear God’s words, which was something that she had also mentioned as a kid, so it might be possible to assume that she had been brainwashed from before she was adopted.
After Suzuha seems very troubled and Daru vows to make things right. He contacts Maho again and begs her to come to Japan and help them. Maho still seems a little reluctant, but she talks to Kurisu and is finally inspired to go. She comes to the conclusion that even if she doesn’t have Kurisu’s answer, she can figure it out on her own by following Kurisu’s path and once again we can connect this to one of those nice Mozart and Salieri comparisons they’ve had throughout all the show so far.
The plot is progressing very nicely as they’re setting things up in a way that seems like there might not be another option at the moment, but I can’t help to expect that things will backfire and they will have a mess to clean. We’ll see what happens next though!