Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 4

Episode 10

This episode is riding on a dangerous edge narratively. It's trying to show us the personal struggle that Subaru is facing—how his lack of knowledge has him double guessing everything and also causes him to make some of the worst decisions possible based on faulty assumptions. The issue is that we, the viewer, know far more than Subaru. Having watched the series, him worrying about things like if Emilia is trustworthy or not is ludicrous. Likewise, we can read between the lines and see that, for example, Subaru accidentally ordered Shaula to dispose of Meili's body this episode. In a real way, Subaru is actively getting in our way of solving the mystery (not to mention his own) with his actions and suppositions.

This could easily make him as a character—and the show in general—more annoying that enjoyable. The anime tries to counter this by taking the shotgun approach to storytelling (firing out tons of random information in the hopes that some of it will keep our attention). For the most part, this approach succeeds this week but it feels like something that can't work in perpetuity.

As for what we are able to figure out with that information, while Subaru doesn't realize it, this episode makes it rather clear that he's possessed by something—likely the same creature that was possessing Rem's body before decapitating him last episode. This explains the odd time skips we've been seeing—whenever this creature takes over, Subaru simply has no memories of this time.

The important thing to note is that it doesn't seem able to take over Subaru permanently (or it'd do so), so it is trying to control him indirectly. It can obviously read his thoughts and is trying to make him fear the him he became over the past year by making it seem like that Subaru is the one taking him over. It is also likely that (based on how it speaks) the Meili hallucination that appears to Subaru after reading her book is a manifestation of this body-snatcher—another way of coercing him to act as it wants him to.

The other interesting bit we get from this episode is the fact that, regardless of Subaru's missing memories, the books do seem to remember everything. Subaru himself appears in Meili's memories which could lead to a potential cure for his condition. If he is able to find enough books from people who encountered him—like Elsa, Petelgeuse, and Regulus—he might be able to reconstruct an outsiders view of his past year.

Moreover, who's to say that there isn't a book for every one of his alternate timeline lives out there on the shelves? I'm mean, they are books that literally appear by magic at the moment of death, after all—and we haven't seen if Return by Death erases them or not. Perhaps, reading all of his 26 previous lives (if I have the count right) is the way he'll get his memories back.

Regardless, at the moment, we're still in the “not enough information to figure out what's going on” part of the Re:Zero cycle. While I expect this to last for several more episodes at least, I also hope we get at least some notable progression—be that in Subaru's character or the overall situation.

Rating:

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Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.