TW: This episode contains a brief scene of a character killing themselves off screen and also shows a character voicing suicidal thoughts. Please watch at your own discretion.
I remember how excited I was for Sonny Boy at the beginning of the season, and now it feels a little like the show’s gone off the rails. I mean yeah, information is still being doled out and the viewer is slowly learning more about why things are the way they are, but there are only three episodes left and I’m having a hard time theorizing how the show might end.
First off, Mizuho’s cats can apparently talk. Humans aren’t able to pick up on their chatter, but Yamabiko can because he’s a dog. And Rajdhani, although he didn’t hear the cats talking, caught on that they were sentient and far more aware than they were letting on.
Also, and this is a really minor personal side note, but I think the nose-drip thing that sometimes appears in anime is completely disgusting and should be abolished. I’ve avoided looking at Mizuho’s one stupid cat the entire season for that exact reason.
In this episode, Nagara, Mizuho and Nozomi have arrived at a frozen world to answer a call for help sent out by another female student. The world is ruled over by two twins, Sou and Seiji. The current argument is because Seiji has one more hair on his head than Sou and is trying to assert dominance as ruler. The two twins have been fighting each other for thousands of years already.
However, both twins possess the power “Reverse” which allows them to reset their world as they choose. The catch is that one twin can use their power but if the other also uses it, then the first reversing is undone. At least that’s my understanding.
It’s revealed after the first reset of the icy world that the twins are not actually twins. One is a copy of the original student with some slight variations.
Ms. Aki, Asakaze and some other students are also on this frozen world. Ms. Aki gives Sou a golden blaster gun and tells him to use it against Seiji. However Seiji is also given a copy of this gun. When the copies face off against each other at the end of the episode, Sou ends up killing Seiji and then, despite having the same hole through his body as his copy, he presumably kills himself with a shot to his own head (it’s not shown on screen; only the gun’s firing noise is heard).
There are a couple of minor subplots running concurrent to the main storyline. The first is that the cats reveal that Mizuho’s power, present before the students started drifting, is somehow responsible for the drifting itself.
Yamabiko has a discussion with Kizuho’s white cat Kaga about how Mizuho’s power works. The cats are apparently doing the item copying themselves, and they even went so far as to hide the group’s one chance to go home! Wait what?! The cats kept their ability to talk and their ability to copy items a secret to protect Mizuho because they feared that Mizuho would be punished by the other students if word got out. However this had the consequence of preventing the group from going home. I’m honestly not quite sure how.
Yamabiko doesn’t buy Kaga’s claim that the cats kept mum on Mizuho’s powers for her sake; he thinks they kept quiet so Mizuho would continue to be reliant on them.
Of the three cats, Kaga (the white cat) is the closest to Mizuho and still sees her as something of a child despite Mizuho being only a couple years away from graduating high school. Kaga gets a bit of a wake-up at the end of the episode when Mizuho, being held at gunpoint by Sou, tells him angrily that, “Nothing ever changes if you keep clinging to somebody! You just have to deal with things yourself!”
Perhaps it’s these words that cause Sou to commit suicide. Maybe he thought that he was too reliant on Ms. Aki, or the copy of himself that he killed. Because without having a person to duel against, then what was his purpose in the frozen world going to be?
The other side plot is Nozomi’s continued distance from Nagara and Mizuho. Nozomi gets into an argument with Asakaze over herself supposedly not having a power (though she did have her Compass power earlier in the series. Maybe it’s gone now) and thus being dead weight for her friends. Asakaze wants Nozomi to stay on the frozen world with him and the other students, but Nozomi rejects him yet again.
Outside alone in the middle of a blizzard, Nozomi quietly tells one of Mizuho’s cats that she’s been having thoughts about ending things so she doesn’t have to endure drifting anymore. Now her recent behavior makes more sense. Nozomi seems to feel like without her power she has no use or purpose to her friends and thus she could just end her life to spare everyone else from having to support someone who couldn’t help with the drifting issue. Enter Nagara who finds her outside and reminds her that she’s the one who helped him to change by showing him her light. It’s a touching moment and maybe Nagara might just be returning Nozomi’s interest in him? Fingers crossed!
So yeah, I’m not sure where Sonny Boy is going to go from here. It’s sounding increasingly like the students aren’t going to be able to go home, and if that’s the case, how will the show end?
I wish that things were explained in more detail and not in flashbacks or asides. I wish the viewer learned things as they happened, such as Rajdhani suspecting the cats knew more than they were letting on. I still want to know what’s up with the fake Ms. Aki too!
There are a lot of loose ends and I wonder if Sonny Boy will be able to neatly tie them up by the end of the series. I did not really enjoy this week’s episode and hope next week’s will be more entertaining.
