Girls' Last Tour

Episode 8

In this episode of Girls' Last Tour, our girls contemplate forgetfulness. When everyone else in the world is gone, there isn't much of anyone to remember that you existed. Even so, Yuu seems to have gotten a head start on that process—she's already having trouble recalling Kanazawa and Ishii just a few episodes after meeting them! At least Chii seems cognizant of the responsibility of memory. This comes to a head when the girls' journey sends them wandering through what appears to be an endless expanse of filing cabinets. In the few that are open, the girls only find seemingly useless objects, which Yuu decides to take with them. Eventually, when they encounter another one of those statues from way back in episode four, Chii realizes that this whole site is actually a graveyard. Since the objects they discovered might be the only things left to memorialize the graves' owners, Chii demands that they return them.

Afterwards, the girls go on an adventure that forces them to confront the basic patterns of their life as well as the inevitability of death. They find another tower and decide to travel up its spiral-shaped interior ramp. Chii's fear of heights starts acting up again, and Yuu chides her over it. Eventually, they reach an impasse where they're forced to either turn around or risk death on a particularly hazardous stretch of track. When they decide to keep moving forward, they survive only by fully committing themselves to their goal. (It's a good thing Yuu mashed the accelerator!) For their fearlessness, Yuu and Chii are rewarded with the wisdom that life is structured much like a spiral, as an occasionally hazardous rhythmic sequence leading up to an unknown destination.

When our girls arrive at the next level, they find the ruins of society to be slightly less dilapidated than down on the surface. There happens to be a beautiful full moon tonight, so Yuu starts using that as an excuse to smash stuff in a fit of “moon madness.” In the process, they stumble upon unopened bottles hosting a mysterious golden liquid. It's beer, of course, so our girls proceed to unwittingly get drunk off their asses. It's a heartwarming little sequence, similar in beauty to the “rain scene” at the end of episode five, but more based in character. It was particularly fun to see Chii let loose and start acting more like Yuu. While our heroines endured great risks to get to this point, moments like these seem to make the whole trial worth it.

Much like the show's excellent fourth installment, this episode delivers a fantastic little parable about the structures that organize life and the value of living even within such constraints as death and forgetfulness. In the first segment, Chii quietly contemplates what might be left of her and Yuu after they die. In witnessing the transient beauty of melting snowflakes, she realizes that they'll probably just be memories in the minds of the few people they've encountered – and that even those will eventually fade. Still, you get the impression that life is worthwhile for the sake of experiencing this beauty. (This is classic MONO NO AWARE, the traditionally Japanese theme of wistfulness at the impermanence of life. It's a sentiment that can be found all over anime, but this is one of the best expressions of it that I've seen for a while.)

In the end, Chii makes the decision to honor other people's attempts to memorialize themselves out of sympathy for their forgotten desires. In the second segment, our heroines negotiate whether it's ever worth risking death when life is so fleeting and precious. It's a bittersweet fact that you have to put yourself at risk to accomplish much of anything – and in the end, they decide that it's worth the risk, emerging from their ordeal wiser for the wear. At the very end, the girls are rewarded for their trials with a moment of unrestrained joy.

Once again, Girls' Last Tour smuggles a surprising amount of philosophy into some otherwise sweet and relaxing slice of life escapades. This beats out the religion episode for my favorite in the series so far, so I'll award it the highest marks possible for the sheer breadth of what it manages to cover in one episode. Girls' Last Tour has been a consistently A-tier show, and I feel that it fully deserves the A+ at this point.

Grade: A+

Girls' Last Tour is currently streaming on Amazon's Anime Strike.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.