Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 4 ‒ Episode 19
While the Pleiades Watchtower clearly has several purposes, the trials within were designed so that only one group of people would be able to overcome them—our heroes. The first trial is impossible if you don't know the layout of Earth's stars. The second requires an ultra-innocent, pretty woman. The third? Well, that seems to require you literally be either the Witch of Envy or one of those who sealed her away. And all this is before getting into the mabeasts, Shaula turning into a giant scorpion, the arrival of the Archbishops of Gluttony, and Satella just showing up whenever things go too far off the rails.
Or to put it another way, everything that happened since our heroes arrived at the Pleiades Watchtower seems designed to lead to this exact ending. Someone who knew the future (or perhaps someone who lived it as his past) must have been behind it—and it's almost certain that this person was Flugel.
But more than that, between this season and Isekai Quartet: The Movie – Another World, it's heavily implied that Subaru and Emilia are Flugel and Satella. At the very least, they look identical to the pair from 400 years ago. And while there are numerous details that seem to contradict them being one and the same, having our main pair (or a version of the pair from one timeline or another) go back 400 years into the past hardly seems out of the realm of possibility for a story centered around time travel.
If we go on the assumption that Flugel is a future, time-traveling Subaru, many of Flugel's more callous actions make sense. He is trying to guide his younger self to the perfect ending—likely one he got close to but never quite reached. He only did what he did to Shaula because he knew she would get a happy ending at the end of it. Oh sure, she's a tiny scorpion now, but once Subaru and the party of Capella, Subaru himself may be able to reshape people just as she has been able to. And if not, well, Flugel clearly turned her into a human once, so some magic has to exist that can do it again.
Likewise, while Rem might not be fully back, she is well on her way to being so. It's likely her memories are either sitting in Roy or Rui's stomach, and it's only a matter of time until she's fully back. I would even go as far as to guess that Subaru, Rem, and (I assume) Rui being teleported out of the tower was also orchestrated somehow by Flugel, as it prevented Subaru from meeting Volcanica—and thus revealing that Shaula isn't the only person who thinks Subaru and Flugel are one and the same.
All in all, this season has been interesting. In some ways—namely the memory loss—it's a retreading of what came before. However, the point gained from it all is that Subaru was always going to grow up eventually. At some point, his actions would cause him to hit rock bottom, and he'd have to force himself to become a better man. And, as a whole, none of our heroes come away having fully accomplished their goals, but all are closer to getting them and have come more to terms with their current situations.
Where do things go from here? I have no idea. But with one girl who has no idea who this weirdo is claiming to be her hero and another who is a Sin Arch Bishop fresh off a battle to the death with herself, I fear things for Subaru will be anything but easy.
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Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll. Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies. discuss this in the forum (176 posts) |
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