Steins; Gate episode 13 : Never ending cycle

Summary:

Mayuri is dead, Okabe is screaming for revenge and he is giving the opportunity, in a last-ditch effort he uses the time leap machine and go back in time to change the outcome of this night.

Impression:

Good news everyone, The Time leap works and you read this in my voice. As expected from a show about time travel, Okabe uses their time leap machine to change the past, but the past doesn’t seem so easy to change. He has a very narrow time limit to save Mayuri’s life, but no matter the choice he makes, the outcomes always stays the same.

In his first attempt he tries to force everyone out of the lab, but then he remembers that the train line is stopped and he gets trapped in Shinning Finger’s trap. In the second attempt even if he takes a safer route and seems to avoid all of SERN’s agent, Mayuri still dies shortly after her watch stopped.

This makes me question if Mayuri can be saved after all. It seems like no matter how the scenario changes, her death cannot be avoided and she was destined to die there. Of course Okabe only had two tries, but how many time will he be able to leap back before he either get caught or become completely insane from all the senseless murder. There is only so much the human mind can withstand before it collapses. So many memories are transferred to Okabe at each leap, at some point he might even forget the reason he came back in time to begin with.

Now while the case of Mayuri is uncertain, I wonder if in those new version of time Makise survives or if she dies too shortly after like in the original. What are the rules of time travel? If it was Makise that would have done the leap she would have tried to understand the limit and the physic of the time travel, she would have tried to understand more in order to know what to do. But Okabe is no scientist, he is a mad scientist. Logic doesn’t lead him, emotions do. He will stubbornly try to save Mayuri without much though, just by trying different things.

I hope that in future attempt he will try to be helped by other people in order to save everyone. It would be interesting to see everyone’s reaction when they learn the trouble they will get into in only a few hours. Even more so if they learn that Mayuri will die, killed by Moeka.

There are so many possibilities of what could happen in the next episode, so many possibilities when you can try to relive the same hours times and times again. Okabe should know that Makise can be trusted, in the two-way back she discovered that he leaped. He could easily tell her upfront and explain everything to her, if both Okabe and Makise leaps back, Mayuri might stand a chance to be saved. After all he is trying to change the future, there is no shame to be had if you ask for help in achieving such an enormous task.

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that Steins; Gate is the best anime of this season, this episode was even better than the previous ones combined and the previous one were all awesome in their own ways. Things are getting more interesting by the minutes, so many possibilities and so little time. Will Tuturu lives? or is she destined to die?

ZeroG signing off