Rewrite

Episode 6

After focusing on specific girls for the last two episodes, Rewrite takes a broader approach with episode 6. The result is an episode that starts out light-hearted but definitely doesn't finish that way.

In the first few minutes at least, the harem antics takes over. Lucia apparently took Kotarou's “joke” about dressing up in a maid outfit and serving him lunch seriously, resulting in the sexiest outfit that any of the girls has yet worn. It also looks like she's joining Shizuru in getting possessive of Kotarou, which leads to the contradictory actions of pressing his arm between her breasts while still physically punishing him for slight lewdness. (She is the series' requisite tsundere, so that's to be expected.) The little missions they go on to determine the origins of supposed supernatural phenomena are good for a chuckle or two, even if the harem hijinks fall flat.

Things take a more serious turn once the gang gets to the heart of a mystery deep in the forest about a supposed rainbow utopia. To this point, the series has only lightly touched on environmental themes, but that aspect has always been there, whether it's the garbage fairies in episode 1, Lucia's obsession with recycling, or the Guardians' efforts to preserve the world. However, the discovery of the polluted stream elevates environmentalism to a focal point, cemented by a pretty dark conversation that Kotarou has with Akane in the Occult Club's room that night. I've speculated before that Akane (and by extension Chihaya) may be from a rival organization to the Guardians, and this conversation definitely points in that direction! If one organization wants to get humans to work toward preserving the world, it only makes sense that a more radical group who sees humanity as the problem, and thus something to be removed, would also exist, which is clearly the way Akane is leaning. Now that her view has been introduced, presumably we will see more of it come up in the near future.

She isn't the only person getting attention either. Reporter Girl pops up again, now missing for days at the end of the episode in that same forest with the polluted stream (yeah, that's totally innocuous), and Ribbon Girl also makes an appearance in that forest. These scenes suggest that Kotarou's dreams about being killed by her ribbons might actually be from a fateful encounter in his childhood that nearly killed him, but those dreams also showed a young Kotori was also present. That definitely means that she knows more about the situation than she has let on so far.

So instead of focusing on any one girl, the overall plot thickens. I consider this a positive turn of events. The series may not be satisfying those who were looking for a closer adaptation of the source material, but viewed as a standalone, the story seems to be moving along just fine at this point.

Rating: B

Rewrite is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.