Another episode 12 FINAL EPISODE! And the dead one is.....

BOOOO! Why are all these shows ending?! What will I do?! Read the back log of stuff I have at my house? Scrapbook events from last year? Finished the plushie I was making at AWA? Crazy thoughts CRAZY!

But yes this is the last episode of Another. I hear rumors there might be some spin offs which is entirely possible given the nature of this series. But I doubt any of the returning cast will be involved. XD Or I hope not anyway. I see why being an only child would be super helpful for your family in this situation. XD Won’t help Japan’s aging society but maybe just this one town.

The understatement of the year!

But anyway it is time to blog the last episode of Another. Spoilers for the dead one being revealed and the body count increasing.

Ah yes perfect time to make a phone call!

Episode Summary: Everyone has finally seen the light (from the flames) and are quickly trying to exit the building. Some groups are more successful than others as shiny chandeliers takes out about 4 people. Other students are stabbed by someone but it is NOT the InnKeeper Lady. Not she is busy trying to kill Teshigawara and Yuuya. Chibiki comes back just in time to stab InnKeeper Lady and to tell everyone this is not normal. OH I SEE. Kouichi is walking slowly down the halls looking for Mei when he finds one of the stabbing victims. Chibiki gets a few students to the van outside and goes back to look for my survivors. Kouichi happens upon another student but she is quickly stabbed to death. The culprit….Kazumi! Kazumi has decides that Kouichi is the dead one (so those other people were just practice) and Kouichi tries to convince him the tragedies started in May. A fight for the knife breaks out and things aren’t looking too good for Kouichi. Izumi comes by and bashes Kazumi in the head. She calls Kazumi a murderer and is about to kill him when Chibiki saves Kazumi. Izumi calls Chibiki a coward for starting this all and runs off. Chibiki takes Kazumi outside but he dies from his injuries (I think).

Kouichi goes back inside so he can find Mei. He finds Izumi trying to kill Mei while Mei is like lalala I need to walk away. Izumi does a good job in bashing Mei in but the building keeps blowing up and falling apart. Kouichi saves Mei and tries to tell Izumi the dead one is NOT Mei. Izumi starts yelling and saying Mei is at fault when a huge lightning bolt hits nearby. The impact breaks the huge glass window and Izumi is struck with several pieces of glass. As Izumi dies she remembers that she met Kouichi last year, around the time her brother died. She tells Kouichi this but he claims not to remember. Izumi is pissed she doesn’t even get a romantic moment even in death. When Kouichi turns around Mei is gone. So he takes out his cellphone and manages to get a hold of her. Mei picks up and tells Kouichi she doesn’t want him near her when she takes out the dead one. So she tells him where she is and he takes off after her. They meet up in the backyard where the dead one is pinned under some fallen debris. Mei again tells Kouichi to back off but he insists on taking a closer look.

Yay a new bunch of messe up kids!

SURPRISE it is his Aunt Reiko. Kouichi is like NOOOOOOO! Mei then explains that she now REMEMBERS that she saw Aunt Reiko die about two years ago, when she was the real homeroom teacher. A student flipped out and killed her and her body was found in the river. The missing desk was in the teacher’s lounge and this class was the only one to have a helper homeroom teacher. Kouichi, despite freaking out, thinks back to the bird saying REI all the time, grandfather crying all the time, and how the 4th rule of surviving school was never to refer to her as Reiko. Mei explains this is why she couldn’t tell Kouichi and picks up the weapon again. Kouichi takes the weapon from Mei and says he will do it instead. Reiko is like no Kouichi it isn’t me! After a moment of hesitation Kouichi decides he is on team Mei and it is a pick axe to the head. Some time passes and students are seen recovering in the hospital. Kouichi and Mei end up visiting Reiko’s real grave. No one else seems to remember Reiko and it won’t be long until Kouichi and Mei forget too. Kouichi doesn’t really want to forget…After spending 5 seconds mourning over Reiko Kouichi tries to put the moves on Mei. She acts coy and it is all very cute. Teshigawara and Yuuya are seen leaving an updated version of the tape (now a CD) in the classroom in hopes that all the students will hear it and come to the logical conclusion to start killing each other at random. THE END!

XO Was….was I right…AGAIN?! I was right on Mirai Nikki and now I am right in this show?! Am I dreaming? Are crazy Tenchi theories actually starting to be right? Or were these shows obvious enough with their explanations?

Well that and I was SPOILED with the knowledge that Ms. Mikami was Reiko. I still don’t know that needed to be hidden from the audience. I mean..they had different voice actresses and looked totally different. Perhaps we needed to be given a reason why Mei didn’t simply tell Kouichi who the dead one was. If it was just his teacher that wouldn’t be so bad. But it was his teacher/Aunt.

Yeppers. I knews it!

But…maybe I am not buying that completely. I might be biased though. Once I learned of this CRITICAL detail I started to pay more attention. Well I started to pay super close attention once I missed so many things in Mirai Nikki episode 1. But yes maybe I did pay attention more that I learned the teacher and Aunt were the same. With all that said how much of the story would have changed had we been aware of that fact? It will probably be impossible to answer that question as I already knew. I are tainted.

Just...yeah. This was weird.

I am not feeling the reason behind why InnKeeper Dude and Lady went insane and started killing everyone. Well we don’t know if InnKeeper Dude did kill anyone. If they were sad their grandson died (of…possible natural causes since he was a sick) why would they turn on each other? I guess it is unclear on who killed InnKeeper Dude and who set the fire but InnKeeper Lady was hardcore insane. I think there was enough tension and crazy going on without adding them into the mix.

Now...I might have just run away from the murderous crazies in my class and not become one. But that is just me.

I am not quite sure how I feel about Kazumi. I think what happened to him was horrible, especially at the hands of his best friend. He was yelled at and interrogated then pushed out a window, left to die. He woke up and everything was insane. However….maybe…just maybe slashing everyone in sight was a bad idea. Not just because it lead to his death (right he did die? He wasn’t the kid in the hospital bed at the end of the episode?) but it just made him look like an insane killer. He needed a reason to after the person he was, like Takako. I mean she had some pretty dang ugly faces going on but she had reasons to think Mei was the dead one. Kazumi was just slashing anyone who was stupid enough to walk by him. I think I would have liked it more had Kazumi just gone after Kouichi, for revenge purposes and for the logical well you joined the class last.

Yeah. Bad Kazumi.

But he didn’t and Izumi, the class “protector” (Buffy laughs in your face!) bashes his head in. Because it is wrong to kill your classmates. Or just Kouichi as five seconds later Izumi is like KILL MEI! Maybe I am being too hard on these kids. XD They have been through a lot. Izumi blames herself for the curse happening, lost her brother to the curse earlier in life, has her best friend is dead in the hallway, and the boy she likes actually likes Mei and they are the reason the curse wasn’t contained. So maybe Izumi losing her mind a little was understandable and justified. Only I find it funny that she was yelling at Kazumi and she turns around to do the same thing later.

I was just trying to protect the class...by killing one of my classmates!

Izumi dying…..a lot of people seem to be angry at that. I am glad that Mei didn’t kill her (although maybe Mei could show a bit more emotion when she is in such peril) but I am having mixed thoughts about her deaths. Love triangles can end with two people getting together and the other person living and finding someone else. People don’t HAVE to die so someone else can get together. So Mei and Kouichi couple fans…Izumi didn’t have to die. But in terms of the show….I have no idea. Could she have lived with herself, as on almost murderer? Seeing so many of her classmates die and what not? I suppose the same could be said about Teshigawara and Yuuya but Izumi slipped into some unstable stuff there that I am not sure she could recover from.

Not seeing the problem with this...

I have heard that some people are upset with the violence and pointless deaths. I mean…I did have a problem with the students being EH? at the news of a fire. But some of the students trying to kill Mei or dying trying to leave the building…sounds pretty believable to me. Chaos was all around them and they were already on edge. Maybe it is special that the fire got THAT bad before they decided to leave the place but logs and stuff falling on people as they try to escape…yeah didn’t seem over the top to me. However I recognize by increasing the death count in such a dramatic way makes the show more of a slasher series instead of a horror show. The line can be fine sometimes and a bit blurry so it can be hard to judge if Another went over that line into slasher territory. Although slasher shows/movies usually have one/two villains doing all the killing and everything is explained at one point….

I think that a lot of stupid already happened...with the whole NOT LEAVING THE BURNING BUILDING!

So after Mei escapes and Izumi is turned into a pin cushion things get a little weird. Chibiki returns from NOT finding the hospital just in time to be the only adult in charge. Not one cell phone was working when a student was having a heart attack but now that Kouichi is inside of a burning building everything works just fine. And Mei doesn’t want Kouichi to come after her while she kills the dead one so she tells him exactly where she is. Things like this make Tenchi a little HMMMM. Also Mei is pretty amazing knowing where the dead one was…all the way outside….her eye is that amazing!

How can this be?! XO Put your glasses on and you will morph into Reiko!

And then the reveal….Aunt Reiko is the dead one! Somehow she survived a mop to head only to be trapped under part of a shed. Kouichi did a great job in being shocked and Mei did a MAGICAL job in explaining everything to us. Like seriously magical. Even though the entire time we have been told that everyone’s memories of the dead person have been altered. Mei is just so magical.

I hope this kid died or Mei let a killer get away with murder. X__X

Aunt Reiko didn’t die during her class’ curse. So Matsunaga actually did kill a boy and it wasn’t a confusion on the pronoun front. However…I felt as if Aunt Reiko’s death was just tacked on after the fact. Like someone killed Reiko. That is all I got. They didn’t do a good job explaining some student (probably the nonexistent one) snapped and killed Reiko in broad daylight. But it did tie in the water and the floating dead body. Like look everything from the opening minus the creepy dolls was important!

Surely that would have been an important piece of information...if I knew more of the Japanese school system.

So the fun facts that were supposed to clue us in about Reiko being the dead one! The bird. I KNEW IT BIRD. The grandfather often cried about BOTH of his daughters being dead and the bird was coping what he was saying, just not completely. Izumi was correct in saying that Kouichi was in town 1.5 years ago as was the father. The reason? Kouichi was attending Reiko’s funeral. Reiko often got headaches…well that might not be a real reason but she did have a hard time trying to remember the past. And the missing desk was in the teacher’s lounge. See everything adds up!

Game over, grandpa has this figured out all along.

Well maybe. I am still a little meh that it turned out to be Reiko. Like I stated earlier I think the dead one should have been a student (even if there were enough clues pointing at Reiko). I didn’t know that it was weird to have a co-homeroom teacher. Mei was like WELL wasn’t the weird Kouichi? It was never mentioned before so how would I know to look out for that? But if it was so obvious maybe the other students should have realized that? Like we have the right number of chairs the entire time why is this happening? Guess they were too focused on blaming Kouichi and his exchange student status.

YAY! We are all happy now!

In the end everything seems okay. I was expecting Kouichi to be slightly more upset that he took out his Aunt with a pick axe. I mean everything they have been through has been rough but that particular point seems extra crappy. Mei and her dead eye seeing self seems okay despite the fact that if she had just OPENED HER MOUTH a lot of lives could have been saved. Kouichi seems more interested in getting it on with Mei than grieving his dead Aunt.

Overall I think this series was pretty decent, a good showing of what a horror show should be about. I do think the end could have been stronger, AKA not being so happy go lucky after the fact. Many people were saying the manga was better. Well after this episode was over I went and read the entire manga (thus so many late posts). The manga and anime were almost exact, with the exception of the beach episode and the final episode. And this might be a shocker…but I liked the anime better than the manga. X__X The manga had some more issues with Izumi but other than that I thought the anime was stronger. XD Which is probably a first…

In conclusion while this series a few minor meh issues overall it was pretty enjoyable. It was nice anime to look forward to on Mondays. Although I am glad that I won’t have to see those creepy dolls anymore. Thanks for the good time Another!