While I intrinsically knew that Ataru and Lum would end up back together by the end of this episode, I was able to suspend that inevitability and exist in complete suspense, if not that they’d reconcile, than how. Lum implies she’ll only let Ataru catch her in their game of tag if he confesses. The three simple words “I love you” are all she wants to hear, and Ataru is the one person who will never say them.
When Rupa realizes how valuable such words are to Lum, he wonders why in all the years he’s known Carla, he’s never managed to say them to her. It’s only when he locates her atop a mushroom that he learns how hard it is. But he can still express the feeling of those words by telling Carla they should go home and get hitched. Carla doesn’t need to hear the words like Lum. She’s fully on board with marriage!
When Lum’s parents’ ship arrives in town, Benten and Oyuki inform Ataru and Lum’s friends that if Ataru fails to confess to Lum, she’ll use the memory scrubber aboard the ship to wipe the memories of any earthlings who interacted with her or any other aliens. In effect, she’s willing to punch up “clear” on the entire Urusei Yatsura series. Even when Ataru hears this, he’s not saying the words. She can go ahead and wipe his memory now for all he claims to care.
He also happens to believe Lum is bluffing, but it’s not Lum who launches the scrubber, it’s Benten, accidentally slamming on the activation switch (which really shouldn’t be a table with tea service on top). Even though it launches, it won’t wipe everyone’s memories until the end of the tenth day of the game of tag. Ataru wakes up in his mushroom-infested bedroom glad to have not forgotten Lum.
Shuutarou, Shinobu, Ryuunosuke, and Inaba don bee jetpacks to intercept the scrubber and shut it down, with balls provided by Ten. On the last night Ten even visits Ataru and in not so many words tells him he doesn’t really want to leave Earth because Ataru and Lum couldn’t settle their differences. And on the tenth day, a battered and exhausted Ataru won’t stop chasing Lum, to the point she really should start to realize that his refusal to give up is his own twisted expression of his unspoken love for her.
When Lum tears up and asks him if he’s really okay with forgetting her, Ataru shouts that there’s no way he’d ever forget her anyway. He also revealed he’s been holding on to the horns she lost since the day she lost them, carrying them with him even as he fruitlessly pursued her. Finally, Lum gets it: this is the man she loves: someone who will always cherish her, but without ever explicitly admitting it.
Lum doesn’t get him to say the words, but more important to her is knowing that he does care about her, no matter what a pain in the ass he is. They embrace in mid-air, Lum places his hand on her horn, and declares him the winner. The scrubber shuts down, and Rupa sends in the pigs to take care of the mushrooms (something he was going to do regardless of the game’s outcome.)
As their friends and family declare, this was one particularly annoying lover’s spat, one that for a brief time was tied to the fate of the earth. I for one am glad those stakes gradually fell away and focused more on the uniquely messed-up Lum-Ataru dynamic. The status quo is restored, and Ataru still hits on other girls, but Lum vows never to give up until he says the words she wants to hear.
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