Minky Momo is dead. Long live Minky Momo. After episode forty-six scarred children of Japan with the magical girl's death via truck, the series still had seventeen episodes to go, well beyond the original slated episode count of fifty. That means that the writers had to figure something out relatively quickly – should the focus be on Momo growing up as the child of her Earth parents? Should it pretend that she never died and treat her death as a nightmare? Or should it try to do something different and essentially reboot the story as a metaphor for Momo coping with her death?

If you guessed the last one, you're on the right track. While episodes forty-seven and forty-eight are clip shows, allowing everyone to get the series back on track, the remaining fifteen episodes focus on new adventures for the Fenarinarsan princess. It begins with her royal father mourning the death of his child. He's by a pond in Fenarinarsa when he notices some strange, diamond-like stones he's never seen before in the water. He fishes them out and brings them home, where the queen suggests trying to fit one into the crown's center, left empty by Momo's death. When he does, the gem is drawn into the crown, and compressed into a laser disc that begins playing scenes of a slightly different Momo. Neither parent knows what's happening, but as the adventures continue, a dark force creeps ever closer – a nebulous black fog that eventually gains a face and a purpose. By episode fifty, we can see a strong implication that the scenes they're watching alongside us are somehow Momo's dreams in infancy; the king notes that Momo is still a baby in her reincarnated form.

This opens the door for what these episodes truly do: giving both Minky Momo and the viewers a way to process her death. Momo died with her mission unfulfilled; Fenarinarsa remains adrift from Earth, and its position as the guardian and source of dreams and wonder is still at risk. Momo was fully aware of the importance of her mission, even as she acted like a typical child, playing her way through her encounters. The suggestion is that she carries guilt from having died before completing her task, and now as an infant, she has no real way to work things out – she can't exactly talk them through, after all. Therefore the dark cloud, later named "Nightmare," is representative of her guilt and fear that she has done irreparable harm, while her adventures can all be seen as her working through what's happened to her.

The primary way we see this is in the amount of deaths Momo encounters in her dreams. In episode fifty-one, Momo meets an actor known for doing his own stunts; he's suffering from a terminal illness and ultimately dies offscreen. Momo must process the fact that she helped him fulfill his dying wish and that he is gone, living on only through his films. In the next episode, a penguin at the aquarium loses her chick, and Mocha has to help the mourning mother – who ultimately forgets her chick when she meets a handsome male penguin. This speaks to Momo's fears of replacement; yes, she's now the baby of her Earth parents for real, but she's also a human, not a magical princess. Does that mean her Fenarinarsan parents will replace or forget her like the penguin replaced her chick? These fears are addressed in the following episode when Momo helps a woman change her tragic past by getting her aboard a ghostly version of the train she never caught the first time around; by helping Cecilia, Momo is thinking about how she can redo her own life and change her fate into a happy ending as she does for Cecilia.

The other throughline in these episodes is the Devil Queen, AKA the evil queen from Snow White. Episode fifty strongly implies that Snow White is dead (as far as the queen and dwarves know, and she does die in the early Grimm version), and Momo attempts twice to disguise herself as Snow White to assuage people's feelings. The Devil Queen then becomes Aunt Devil, a woman trying to atone for what she did, primarily by selling good-tasting apples from the Fairy Tale Forest and using the profits to benefit others. Aunt Devil could represent Momo's desire to help others even though she's now an ordinary human, a dream of finding a way to still make a difference in the world even without her magic powers.

All of this, naturally, is almost undone when Nightmare catches up to her. The final three episodes of the series are dark, with episode sixty-two being genuinely scary as Nightmare picks off Momo's friends and family one by one, forcing her to doubt herself and all of the good she did before her death. It's not a spoiler to say that she and her friends do ultimately triumph (the statute of limitations on spoilers is certainly up after forty years), Still, it's not an easy journey for Momo, emotionally. She has to come to terms with the end of her old life and embrace her new one, and so do we, as viewers. It's a hefty lesson, even for the after-school special era of children's entertainment (to say nothing of the toy-selling era), but one that I do think works.

Alongside the recurring character Aunt Devil, Momo is also joined by a pink dragon named Kajira, whom she meets during a tongue-in-cheek episode about Momotaro that the anime addresses in English as Peach Boy. Kajira, who looks like a pink Spike from the original My Little Pony franchise, does serve a very important purpose. For most of the series, he's simply chompy comic relief, chewing his way through everything he can get his mouth on while highlighting the production values with his ever-changing size. Momo's new outfit is cuter than her old one – her vest is now a hoodie, which works well – and her new transformation has 100% less butt, looking more like the light show transformation of the later magical girl series. Her transformations continue to have an amusing degree of specificity – at one point she notes that she's a jet pilot, not a regular pilot, and therefore can't fly an old biplane. And of course, there are still the issues of a piece of media from a less enlightened time; episode fifty-one has a pretty horrific stereotype of a First Nations man (complete with saying "how" as a greeting).

Fairy Princess Minky Momo takes more twists and turns than were probably originally intended. Momo's death and these episodes that help her to process it may not be out of line with other international children's media of the 1980s, but the turning point that was episode forty-six left an indelible mark on the series' ending. It's a must-watch for anime historians, but also a good, if not occasionally bizarre, story in its own right.