We continue last weeks flashback with how the girls met Miki and Taroumaru in the mall. They arrive there at the beginning of the episode and move through the mall looking for things that aren’t destroyed and relaxing a bit. Since, as the episode states, they are girls. There is a chunk of the episode dedicated to them trying on various types of clothing. Megu-nee can’t fit into her outfit, so Yuki decides to get her a teddy bear to cheer her up.
Well, as it’s a public secret at this point that Megu-nee is an Illusion of Yuki’s, she can’t carry a teddy bear. So she tells Yuki to keep it, all of the manga readers will recognize this bear as one that becomes important later.
Taroumaru’s barking leads the girls to believe that there might be a survivor to be found. Which they are right in, however, they go to the wrong place and stumble upon a movie theater full of zombies. This marks the first time in the anime that Yuki is faced with the zombies and she does not react to them well. She zones out completely. At least, until later in the episode.
Miki, hearing the girls as they run away from the zombies chasing them from the theater. Packs up her things and goes to leave, however, on her way out. She gets cornered by the zombies and is stranded on a piano. Yuki hears her and Taroumaru runs in, the girls all rush in to save her. Yuki is once again faced with the zombies and vaguely remembers something. A certain teacher, giving her life to protect her students.
This episode has a lot of disturbing imagery and bits of foreshadowing that manga readers sat there and sobbed quietly during. The image in Yuki’s nightmare of the girls from episode 1 becoming zombies and her standing alone in a class room of zombies, the flashback to Megu-nee protecting them. The scene of Kei in the opening, changing to show her walking away into a thing of zombies.
How soon until the image of Megu-nee changes in the opening? What about Taroumaru? How much more will things change by the time the series is done?
It’s strange, to see how things have been changed. Some things have less impact, some things have more. They lessened the blow of loosing Megu-nee, however, they added the blow of seeing Kurumi’s boyfriend. Of those girls from episode 1. I enjoyed a lot of the things done in this episode and look forward to the next ones. Next episode is called “Welcome” so I assume it will cover the chapter where Miki first comes to the school and her issues with Yuki’s delusions. We’ll see how they handle it.
~Midnight
Omg I JUST figured out the twist with the teddy bear. I didn’t catch on at all, until I saw a post that explicitly pointed it out. How sad. 🙁 Also, I’m pretty sure this Taroumaru is the real alive version in the anime (you can never be too sure though), so do you think they’ll kill him off eventually? [spoiler]Seeing a dog zombie was pretty interesting in the manga.[/spoiler]
I have a sneaking suspicion that they might have him get bitten instead of someone else, it’s just a theory right now. We’ll have to see how the anime plays it.
Despite having come to be up-to-date with the manga before this episode came out, seeing Miki’s rescue in motion brought a tear to my eye. It really is nice when an anime adaptation can mix things up a little and still be as enjoyable as the manga overall! I’m a just a tad bit sad that we didn’t see [spoiler] the sequence when Kurumi visits her home and lies on her own bed one last time. I thought that it was a very powerful and almost sweet moment despite the dark implications. That said it could easily occur once they leave the school “for good”, thus adding each events’ sense of finality together to become a sequence with even more impact than before. [/spoiler]