English Dub Review: Higurashi – When They Cry: Sotsu “Curse-Revealing Chapter, Part 3”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Satako stops attending classes, leading her friends to rally the class to protest the Child Welfare building to “save” her from Teppei. Unknown to them, Satako has been telling her uncle that the whole village is out to get them for being Hojos, leading to Detective Oiishi showing up to properly deterimine whether or not anything bad is actually going down. Satako ends up sedating them and injecting Oiishi with the Hinamizawa Syndrome accelerant, which sets off his suspicions about Oyashiro’s curse to go into overdrive and makes him start setting up Teppei as the awful person people expect him to be, with the hopes that he’ll be targeted by the “curse” to give Oiishi a chance to find out the “real culprit”.

OUR TAKE
Okay, for once, we seem to have some interesting developments that I can focus on analyzing without going into the usual stupor of rage that I’ve been on for most of this season. This episode shows off the true lengths of Satako’s manipulations throughout this arc that we weren’t aware of back in Gou, which actually gives us some subversive twists worth addressing. For one, there’s the obvious turn around that everyone planning to save her from Teppei is being played because Teppei is a shadow of his old abusive self. If anything, you could rather say that he needs to be saved from Satako, which is only going to become more apparent next episode. And again, in a perfect world, Teppei should still have to answer for his abuse of Satako and Satoshi even if it was in a different timeline, but even he doesn’t deserve to be used like this. He’s definitely not any sort of model citizen, but as far as anyone else in this version of events should be concerned, he’s doing a lot of tough work to turn over a new leaf for his niece, even while believing that the whole village is ready to have him burned at the stake.

But the major twist of the episode is probably the revelation that Oiishi was Satako’s target for infection, as well as finding out that the damage done by Teppei at this point in the story was actually done by Oiishi instead. The cop has a very personal connection to the curse of Oyashiro, namely that an old friend of his was the first to be killed because of it. Since then, even if it’s been subtle, he’s had a major vendetta against whoever might be the source of that tragedy and the three that followed it. At the end of the main story, he was able to channel that into stopping Miyo Takano, who did at least cause the third murder and disappearance and planned on perpetuating it for her research. But here, Takano is no planning anything, and he’s now been drugged to have his paranoid fantasies go into overdrive. With that in mind, his plan is actually a bit clever: He’ll rile up the town against Teppei, who they already don’t care for, essentially making him easy bait to lure out the killer and finally end the curse. A lot more thought out a plan than what Mion and Rena got up to, though I guess they hadn’t really thought their ideas out before getting drugged. And it’s not like Oiishi’s plan ends up going all that well either, as we know full well by now with how this arc ends for him. But we aren’t done with the surprises yet.