OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)Nene talks to the hospitalized Shijima and learns of her Wonder’s origins.OUR TAKEWe’re coming up on the end of our time with Hanako and friends for this season, but this episode is pretty much all for Nene. We finally get a full backstory of Shijima, which basically turns into the clearest look we’ve gotten yet as to how a ghost in this school forms based on rumors and hearsay, and can even rise in the ranks depending on what type of rumors are spread in order to become a Wonder of the School. I mean we’ve certainly had explanations for how other Wonders came into being, like the Second Wonder early on in the series, but while they were tragic, they also had a bit of distance in them, both in time and emotional connection. For Shijima, THIS Shijima, she was brought into being from people thinking the worst of her and her parents, thinking she killed herself because she couldn’t draw when really she just died of her disease. And now she’s become so resentful of this that she is willing to reach through time and kill her original self, or at least whatever is left of her in her twisted world, in order to grant her some odd form of mercy.As you can probably tell, this dovetails into Nene’s current predicament, as well as parallels the problem between her and Hanako, in a more twisted way. Wonder Shijima wants to kill her original, or at least what’s left of her, because she can’t live the proper life she deserves, but said original just wants to live the life she can with her Wonder self, leading the two to finally reconcile. While there’s no plans to directly kill Nene, Hanako does want to keep her basically imprisoned in this fake world that Shijima made in order to keep her from dying (in whatever way that is supposed to happen, it’s kind of vague) while Nene also wants to live whatever life she has left in the real world alongside Hanako. With the answer to this conundrum in hand after seeing the Shijimas make up, Nene gathers everyone together so that they can find Hanako and convince him to help them all escape, Nene included. And that just leaves us with one episode left, which we’ll get to next week. It’s been a surprisingly fun journey for me going from just knowing this from the comedy shorts and onto watching the full show, but here’s hoping the ending will be satisfying.
