English Dub Review: Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun “Summer Lights”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Hanako, Nene, and Kou go to a summer festival, but Nene ends up going back in time and meets Hanako before he was a ghost.

OUR TAKE

More Hanako stuff again! And this week instead of having people worry about how Nene is going to die soon, let’s have an episode that is mostly about Nene, the one person who doesn’t know she’s going to die soon! And also, have her dive a bit more into Hanako’s backstory as Yugi Amane, the fun space loving kid he was before he died from jumping out a window. Or slipping and falling? A lot of stuff about that is still unclear and will likely remain unclear for awhile, but the point is that Nene goes back in time to the sixties when he was alive and right after the moon landing, something that he was very into at the time. Nene, being a kind person who also knows him in the future, is nice to him but needs to find a way home and gives him her wish granting paper, and he ends up wishing to see her again in the future, which he does, as Hanako. Grandfather paradox, babyyyyyyyyyy. The whole of space and time is simply a snake eating its own tail! Although there’s always the chance this is just another memory that is somehow stored somewhere so maybe she didn’t time travel at all.

So it’s kind of nice to give Nene a focus episode after a handful of episodes that were mainly about establishing that she’s going to die and she can’t know about it. Nene is still pretty much the protagonist here, as the point of view character that the viewer started this journey with, so I do not expect that too much will actually be happening to her at the moment. Heck, we don’t even know what happens to kill her in the first place, but we may have just established actual time travel here, so maybe this is how we’re setting up ways for other characters to change the timeline to save her. This season did begin by introducing characters with control over aspects of time after all, so who’s to say that everything in the timeline is set in stone necessarily. But whatever we may be getting in the latter two thirds of this season, we won’t be knowing any of it for sure until we get there, let’s wait patiently for further plot developments in Toilet Bound Hanako-kun.