Send the dead back to where they belong. Find and kill the Another – that’s how to stop the calamity.
Summary
Class 3 finally go on their summer trip, where Kouichi and Mei listen to the rest of the tape with Teshigawara and Mochizuki. Matsunaga tells them that he killed his class’ Another by accident, realizing that the calamity stopped itself after he had died. During dinner, while Akazawa pins the blame for starting the calamity on Mei, a classmate named Wakui falls victim to the calamity after he suffers an asthmatic attack without a spare inhaler, with everyone’s phones coincidentally out of range.
Mei asks Kouichi to show her the Class 3 photo that Reiko was in, where they manage to identify the Another from his distorted and pale colouring in the photo. She tells him of her real heritage, of how she and Fujioka Misaki were in fact twins separated ever since birth, but had been meeting in secret. Since Fujioka Misaki died in April as the first victim of the calamity, Kouichi realizes that the calamity had begun even before he transferred. When Mei reveals that her glass doll’s eye can see the “colour” of death, Kouichi pesters her for the identity of the Another, but they are interrupted by Teshigawara, who claims he’s done something very wrong.
Impression
Oh, the irony – Akazawa goes on about how Mei needs to apologize for dragging them into the calamity this year, when in fact, not only did it start before Kouichi showed up, it was half her fault as well for not acting properly as head of countermeasures. With Mei being the only one that can get them out of the mess without any more unnecessary deaths, (though that’ll never happen) it’s pretty poor treatment from Akazawa to someone that’s your only quick salvation. On an unrelated note, I prefer her with twintails compared to having her hair loose xD
At this moment, my guess is that the calamity is divine intervention; the method some greater force uses to weed out who the Another is – by killing off students one by one, until it becomes the Another’s turn to die. Once he or she is killed, the calamity stops – which is what Matsunaga did, except he sped things up by unknowingly targeting just the Another. In previous years, since no-one knew who that was, all they could do was wait until the right person died.
I’m so glad that Mei’s request for the old Reiko class photo wasn’t anything malicious – I wouldn’t be able to bear it if either her or Kouichi turned out to be the Another. I was a bit surprised about the fantasy-like properties of Mei’s glass eye, even though they’d already hinted at it throughout the series. Though it does prove that they both aren’t the Another, the fact that Mei possesses the eye is suspicious in itself, considering that she’s been shrouded in a lot of mystery. There’s also the bringing up of the various angel dolls and the angel Mei was drawing – symbolic to an angel of death, perhaps?
Mei’s childhood past was pretty sad, with her being denied the chance to meet her real mother and having to meet her twin sister in secret. Would these secret meetings have validated Mei’s existence, meaning that the class’ blanking wouldn’t have done any good either way, starting off the calamity? If so, then it’s just a case of being really, really unlucky, since there have been years where the calamity just started up even though the class seem to be following the “rules”. This seems to be one of those years.
Teshigawara’s panicking was to be expected, since I’d think Mochizuki would be level-headed enough to cope. I wouldn’t be too surprised if he’s started killing classmates out of desperation to end the calamity – a very Battle Royale/Lord of the Flies/Classroom of Truth kind of scenario. Seeing as the method to stop the curse will eventually get out to everyone in class, it hints at a large-scale showdown instead of a quiet final incident, something which is nigh-impossible given how out of control everything seems to be. A way out would be to have Mei scan the photo Mochizuki took of the class with her glass eye, which would point out the Another immediately, solving one of their problems at least. One thing I know for sure though – if it’s not a teacher, the Another is probably Akazawa, Mochizuki, Teshigawara, Kouichi or Mei. Yup, not ruling the last two out because they seem “safe”, there’s no way of telling what’ll be revealed next.
