Series Summary
"A group of students on summer vacation find themselves transported to another dimension and granted superpowers to survive there." (IMDB)
Episode 3 Summary
"Nagara, Nozomi, Asakaze, and Rajdhani continue searching for new worlds." (Hulu)
(Nagara & Mizuho sitting with one of the frozen missing students)
(Mizuho & Nagara interviewing the student with the terrestial power)
(The black curtains holding the frozen students being lifted into the air--it looks like a dark rose)
(Tanigawa ominously talking to someone in front of a portal to a solar eclipse)
Notes & Thoughts
Nagara, Nozomi, and Red Shirt Boy find a “gate” to another world in a toilet. Nozomi pushes Nagara in and he sinks into a red watery abyss with giant worm-like serpents at the bottom before Nozomi and Red Shirt Boy pull him out.
Red Shirt Boy’s name is Asakuze.
Indian Boy’s name is Rajdhani. He is s some kind of tech-wiz genius and created a multi-layer map of the school and all the gates and worlds they lead to. He reveals that using a special device and Asakuze psycho-kinetic flying feature that the point her “compass” hones in on is in a dimension outside theirs since measurements have it never growing closer or farther.
Do some students have different powers in different worlds?
One of the students has become a black statue near a stream. Machi calls it “freezing” during a meeting with other students.
Mizuho shows up with what looks like a Starbucks drink. Everybody’s struggling to survive or solve the mystery of their predicament—and here’s Mizuho, the human Amazon Prime machine. Machi asks her to help solve the freezing mystery and when Mizuho says no, she offers them all to vote on it. We get a glimpse of Tanigawa and then Mizuho agrees to help on the condition that Nagara help.
I think the Rajdhani’s power is creating weird brightly-colored machines—I don’t know how I’ve missed that but the toy lightsaber thing Nagara and Mizuho are using is very cartoonish.
Mizuho and Nagara “listen” to the first frozen body and hear him streaming a game. The second guy is working out. Strange, their bodies are not moving and yet they can hear them doing something inside themselves. Mizuho says the only thing the two frozen guys have in common is that they weren’t very popular and no one paid attention to them.
Mizuho says she’s the boss and Nagara’s the assistant. Her cat shows up with fast food. I wonder if the cats actually have the item-producing power and that’s why she was so distraught over losing Tora.
They visit a guy in charge of some weird clubhouse on the island. He wants Mizuho to join his club but she says he doesn’t want her, he just wants her power. When she and Nagara leave, the guy gives a weird look back at Asakuze’s friend sitting by a no cats allowed sign, the blonde electrical girl. Possible culprits?
Nagara points out that thanks to Indian Boy’s digital money, everyone has to work and pay Mizuho for the items she makes with her power so the items don’t burst into flames. He points out that everyone has to slave away for the things she makes on a whim without labor. Mizuho says powers are wealth and every system has poor who labor for the goods of the rich.
The two interview students about the ones who “froze.” They show the difference between the many students sweating while laboring and the Bowl Cut Kid who lifts three trees by raising his hand. Not sure if he can only move dirt/sand or if he has telekinesis like Asakuze.
Mizuho tells Nagara her cats belong to her grandma who got institutionalized for dementia. And then adds a huge new element to the story—she could use her power before their school “went adrift.” In a flashback, a package spontaneously appears under one of her grandma’s cats. It still feels like this ability might be related to the cats. She says she could only use her powers at school and that there were others who had powers back then too. We get a glimpse of Tanigawa staring at a test marked 100 percent and then his class becomes empty and a hidden man says a power you can only use at school.
Tanigawa visits one of the frozen students and Nozomi comes over to voice her concern. She wants to know if this is someone’s secret power or a new rule of the island. He reveals he knew the school would go adrift before it did and that a voice speaks to him and tells him things.
Rajdhani tells Asakuze they haven’t found a new gate in three days since Nagara’s been gone but Asakuze says he doesn’t need Nagara and that eventually he’ll find a new gate.
Mizuho criticizes one of her cats for bringing her the wrong item. It hisses at her. I knew it. The cats are like sentient magic lamps.
She tells Machi and Cap that all victims were people who were excluded and that it’s probably someone’s power.
Mizuho and Nagara ask Glasses Kid for a list of student powers that Hoshi made. Who’s Hoshi? Last time that name was mentioned, Cap got really upset. One of Mizuho’s cats brings Glasses Kid a bowl of noodles so he lets her look at the list of powers.
Super Gravity.
Newtonian Clay.
Nyamazon, Mizuho’s power to order things from her cats.
Switch, that’s Machi’s power to switch places with objects.
Universal Clubhouse, probably the power of the guy who wanted Mizuho to join his club. I wonder if people kicked out of his club get “frozen” as an embodiment of their exile from the group. There was a no-cats-allowed sign near the blonde electrical girl, which felt like a trap to reveal that Mizuho’s powerless without her grandma’s wish-granting cats.
Electric Zap, probably the blonde girl’s power.
Terrestrial, possibly the Bowl Cut Kid who appears to control dirt and sand, maybe trees too.
The Glasses Kid with the noodles reveals that’s he’s A-ranked for his ability to light up his finger like E.T., Nagara is not impressed and neither am I.
Mizuho stares at the Universal Clubhouse power on the list but says none of the powers seem obviously related to the frozen excluded people. She adds that they can’t trust that the list is complete because someone might be hiding their power or using their power to keep everyone misinformed, probably referring to Tanigawa.
Asakuze flies in and lies to Nagara, telling him that they’ve found plenty of gates without him and that Nozomi said she doesn’t want his help anymore. It’s awkward and obviously a lie but Nagara apologizes and Asakuze flies away.
Asakuze and Mizuho share a strange look.
Their phones ring and on Group Talk it’s revealed another student named Kaga has frozen. In the chat, students panic and ask if it’s some sort of disease. Some says this is what we get for letting Mizuho try to solve this. Despite her continuing to help everyone, they’re very suspicious of her.
Mizuho asks Nagara why Asakuze would say all that stuff to him. He says he doesn’t know and she says they both know Asakuze’s a lying scum bag but wants to know why he dislikes Nagara but he says it doesn’t concern her. Probably because it concerns Nozomi.
She keeps bugging him and he says Asakuze’s flying power is better than his gate-finding power, so fighting him is pointless.
The world ripples around them. Nagara looks at the sky strange and then pulls it all down like a curtain revealing they’re in a strange room with a yellow floor and black curtains. They travel through the black curtains and find the missing students alive in different rooms, doing different activities. They reveal that they disappeared when they wanted to be alone. None of them wish to return to the island. I wonder if Nagara’s gate-finding power revealed a doorway to the pocket dimensions the excluded have run off too.
They report back to Machi and Cap. Machi’s annoyed that they haven’t undone the missing students “freezing” but Nagara says the frozen students don’t want to be unfrozen. Mizuho says they could ask Asakuze to force them back into the real world. She gets annoyed and says maybe they could lure them out with money and goods but Nagara says that won’t work either. She asks him what will work but he says he doesn’t know. She ridicules him for his lack of solutions and says this is why Nozomi will give up on him someday. Mizuho says Nozomi has been following Nagara like a puppy and that Nagara’s afraid to find out if they’re more than friends. He says maybe he prefers it that way, not knowing, not doing anything more. Mizuho yells at him that doing nothing won’t be enough for him or the frozen students, that if you don’t chase things you’ll lose them.
What happens next is confusing. Nagara claims Mizuho wanted to investigate the frozen students to find out how powerless she is, that he thinks she lied about having her power before the school left the real world, and she’s ill-natures for wanting labor and hard-earned money in exchange for the stuff she could easily give away for free if she didn’t secretly always want something in exchange. Why does he think she’s lying? And doesn’t he understand the island’s blue fire demands they exchange Mizuho’s goods for labor or currency?
Nagara goes to Rajdhani’s tent and sulks. Indian Guy says they haven’t found new gates since Nagara’s been gone with Mizuho. Nozomi shows up and says they need Nagara’s help because Asakuze can’t find new gates without Nagara. They ask how his case is going. He says all the frozen people hate life on the island and have run away to pocket dimensions they refuse to leave from. Nozomi points out that one of the gates to another world at the school was hidden by a black curtain. Rajdhani says that’s interesting since Nagara never found a gate outside the school before.
Mizuho sits in her room in her castle and wonders if she was too mean to Nagara who texts her an apology and says to meet him at the black curtains to start over on the frozen people problem again tomorrow.
Nagara shows up the next day with some robotic cartoon dogs that look similar to the inventions Rajdhani makes. Are Rajdhani and Mizuho’s powers related? I don’t remember him asking for anything in return. Mizuho watches him set up a giant fan from Rajdhani. He uses to it blow the black curtains into the air, before he uses some floating robotic hands to hold it high in the sky. Up there, the black curtains look like a giant dark rose. Nagara presses a button on the robotic dog leash and it turns into a laser beam that destroys the black curtains. This unfreezes the frozen students. Far away, Nozomi says it’s extremely difficult to talk about the things deep inside yourself.
Mizuho says they solved the case and Nagara apologizes for being mean to her. She says they both were. They shake hands and Machi frowns at the two from a distance. Perhaps she didn’t actually believe or want Mizuho and Nagara to solve the case but to fail and further their own isolation from the group.
Asakuze goes to the school’s audio lab and tries to activate the black curtain gate but nothing happens. The part of the island where the black curtains were destroyed is black and Rajdhani confirms to Nozomi that the island was the cause of the freezing. He wonders how Nagara and Mizuko found a gate/portal outside the school. Nozomi looks happy and says she thinks Nagara’s power is the ability to find and leap into new worlds. She points out that the school moved to a new world when he went out of his way to save her, and that his intent to save her may have moved the school from the void to the island.
Machi plays with a shred of the black curtain in secret and asks herself if it is a “power hold-over.”
Tanigawa stands in the middle of ruins we’ve never seen before and dark doorway with a solar eclipse in it. He says as if speaking to someone, “A savior? Why, who could that be?”
Why is this called Sonny Boy?
Analysis & Criticisms
While last episode was about the emotional costs of voluntary and involuntary transactions, episode three appears to be about the patience of solving a problem versus the impatience of wanting solutions. There’s a small bit about the will to do things that makes things happen, good or bad.
Machi doesn’t like Mizuho and sends her off to investigate the freezing problem to further isolate Mizuho if she fails. Sensing Nagara is a nice person, Mizuho asks him to help her. They have to gather clues and learn more about the freezing problem, which takes time. They interview people and learn a few things but Machi isn’t happy with that. She doesn’t want to learn more about the problem, she simply wants Mizuho to admit she failed or for the problem to be immediately solved. While learning about the problem, Mizuho and Nagara learn more about each other. She has a grandma with dementia and that’s where her cats are from. Also, she claims she had her power before the school moved to the void. When Nagara finds the frozen people behind the black curtains, he doesn’t force them to return to the island and just listens to them. He seems to identify with their feelings of exclusion and despair. I wondered to myself while watching if the hard frozen shell around the missing students and the black curtain represented depression. Unable to identify, solve, or confront a problem, people can retreat not just from society but personal functionality itself—like the students. They’re all off doing their own things in a hidden pocket dimension but they’re both sad and unwilling to return to the world or happier versions of themselves. When Nagara uses Rajdhani’s cartoon machines to destroy the black curtain, I didn’t think that was too different than Mizuho’s idea of Asakuze forcing them out with his power. But later, we see everyone surrounding and talking to the missing people once they’re hard black shells crack and fall away. Maybe all they needed was recognition or someone to show that they cared. It felt like an oversimplified solution that they just glossed over with pretty colors and catchy music. Depression can’t be cured by pulling people out of depression. Their problems must be identified, studied, and attempted to be solved, while rehabilitating the person to their former adequate or above adequate standards of personal functionality. Rajdhani’s cartoon machines felt like a magic Big Pharma pill that “fixed everything” in a very nondescript nonsensical way. It was also bizarre when Nagara used the machines to lift the black curtain in the air and it looked almost like a giant black rose. Is the show trying to say depression is the dead form of something, or maybe that it is in some morbid and unorthodox way—beautiful?
There’s a moment when Mizuho tries to insinuate that Nozomi might like Nagara since the girl is always following him around but he says he doesn’t want to know whether she likes him or not, that he likes how they are as is. He seems afraid to find out if there’s more to the two of them and Mizuho basically calls him a coward for not wanting to find out or not. She compares it to his unwillingness to force the frozen students from the black curtain rooms, or lure them out with money and goods. I wanted him to say that he understood the frozen students, that what’s wrong with them can’t be forcefully solved or fixed through trickery. At one point, Nozomi says it’s difficult to talk about what’s deep inside a person and that’s the closest we get to addressing that issue of internally abysmal torment. Anyway, his will to do something is revealed to be a part of his power to enter new worlds since when he went out of his way to catch Nozomi when she jumped in the void world OT not only sent the two of them to the island world but the school and the other students too.
I was curious about Tanigawa’s power existing before the school moved to the void and what that meant for him and Mizuho, along with anyone else whose powers emerged in the real world. That voice in his head, reminded me of the weird voices connected to him and his visions/hallucinations—and that final scene of him in some ruins in front of a dark doorway to a solar eclipse felt very ominous. Is the voice responsible for their powers and their school moving around to different worlds? Like Nozomi mentioned, are they being tested and why? Also, what role is Tanigawa playing in all of this?
