Yeah I know I didn’t do a review last week when episode 12 of Charlotte came out, but I was busy doing other things. And personally I had given up a little due to my hatred for episode 11 and distaste for episode 10. I figured I should watch the last two episodes together, sort of like ripping off a band-aid. But once I did finish both episode 12 and 13, I found myself rather surprised.
Episode Summary’s
Yu recovers in episode 12 and decides to go and plunder everyone’s ability with the prospect of coming back to Nao and becoming lovers.
Episode 13 is him plundering every ability in the world and slowly losing his mind. He comes back to Nao not being able to know who she or anybody is. But Nao sees that he kept her gift to him this whole time and they begin their relationship as lovers.
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Episode Thoughts
It took me a while to put aside my personal feelings about the direction that Charlotte has taken. I can be rather stubborn and if a story totally changes direction I have a knee jerk reaction to the point of feeling betrayed by the show. But once I took a two-week brake and came back to Charlotte, I realized that, while the change in shift was a major negative for the show as a whole, I still could try to salvage where it was going. Thankfully episode 11 must have been a fluke in the plot, because episode 12 sort of brought the show back to form. And in doing so, brought my interest level slightly back to what I had expected of this show up until episode 10.
Sure nothing really happens in episode 12 but the anticipation of what is to come is enough to warrant the episodes existence. They didn’t really have to show Yu healing for a whole episode. But if they didn’t it wouldn’t have made his choice to go and save literally every ability user in the world believable. The episode helps sink in the reasons for why he needs to go and save everyone as a character. And not why he needs to save everyone because that’s the plot of the show. It feels like there is legitimate decision-making again and not just characters being jerked around by what needs to happen to move on with the plot.
Plus I have been anchoring for closure with Yusa/Misa ever since their intro. So the fact that they implemented it so well and didn’t really beat around the bush really made that scene. I mean sometimes its really easy to say what you need to say, especially when its a second chance you’re getting. I think that this was the perfect place to implement this closure and have it be as important to what was going on in the story.
So if episode 12 left me hopeful about how the show was going to wrap up, episode 13 brought be back down to reality. 16 minutes of him hoping countries stealing abilities and losing his mind just wasn’t effective this time. Maybe it would have been if we didn’t already see this when Ayumi died, but we did. It felt like the same thing and that’s all I could think of when watching the majority of this episode.
Well that’s not completely true. Once he got the ability to heal I started to scream at my TV “Why don’t you just heal every one with abilities? It’s a disease, isn’t it? You are fucking retard!” From then on everything that happened with his mental state I couldn’t get into because I knew he had this ability that literally could solve everything he was going through. And you might be thinking, “Well you don’t know if the healing ability only works on wounds and isn’t able to heal the ability disease.”
First of all, if his ability to speed up diseases works on abilities, then he should be able to heal them as well. Secondly, all it would have taken was him attempting and failing to heal an ability, and then I would have known. But no, that doesn’t happen. I’m just left with the rest of his journey thinking this whole situation could have been avoided if he weren’t a fucking idiot. They introduce that ability to show how he is resolved to not use abilities for personal gain, but they ignore it because otherwise they wouldn’t get the stupid sappy ending that they wanted.
What would be so wrong with him coming home fine and having his memory in tact. Why did we have to see 16 minutes of him saving the world and only got four minutes at the end to tie up the most important relationship of the show. Isn’t that what people want to see? The resolution of Nao and Yu’s promise. Sure we get scenes of him being overly protective of her gift to him, but again that only is touching if you don’t think about how he could be healing himself, and that this shouldn’t even be a problem! And somehow Nao’s brother is calm with an autograph from Sarah again. when did that even happen? That was in a previous timeline. How does Yu even contact Sarah? He met her by chance. Ugh, this doesn’t make any sense!
Episode 13 just makes me mad because they set up everything so well in episode 12 to have an emotional fulfilling finale. But they instead took too much time on things I didn’t care about and used stupid reasoning to make the ending feel as sad and emotional as possible, almost to the point to where I feel I’m being manipulated by the story.
I have many more thoughts about these set of episodes but I think I’ll save it for my series review, because those points pertain to Charlotte as a whole. Also I need some time to cool down for what feels like a second betrayal from this show. As it stands I don’t know what I’m going to rate this show as a whole. Episode 12 was really good, but the complete face-plant in the finale ruined the ending for me.
