When Raida hears that Akibo has seen GOA’s table tennis play, he gets her in a one-on-one meeting ASAP to try to salvage the production. He first admits his weak position due to Akibo’s right to pull out of the project at any time. But he also gets her to admit that as a first-time stage-around playwright, her script isn’t going to be a perfect 100.
Having watched GOA’s play and remembering Yoriko’s advice, Akibo agrees to meet Raida and GOA halfway. She accepts that she needs his professional experience in this medium, but her condition is that she and GOA will revise the script together, working in close collaboration via Zoom.
Raida has his reservations, as something like this could widen the rift between Akibo and GOA, but things can’t get much worse, so he rolls the dice. And what do you know, once they start working together and learning more about what makes each other tick, the two find that collaborating on the new script is not only possible, but fun as hell.
I’m glad GOA wasn’t tossed to the side, and also glad that thanks in large part to Yoriko giving her a reality check, Akibo is learning how to interact creatively with others and deriving enjoyment from it. Raida’s gamble actually ends up working too well; the script the two giddy creatives turn in is a completely different animal from the original.
For one thing, it cuts out a lot of expository dialogue in favor of using movements, gestures, and emotional acting to express the same ideas on the stage. For someone used to adapting, this comes as a fresh and exciting new challenge for Kana. Akane is glad the Saya more closely hews to the one in the manga.
For a relative newbie to acting like Melt, it’s a source of anxiety; he’s not sure he can pull off what the script is now asking of him in just two weeks. And then there’s Aqua. In his head, he’s not sure he can pull it off either. In rehearsals he doesn’t show the necessary emotion, and Kana, pulling no punches, says that’s an extension of Aqua’s everyday personality, in which he almost never shows emotion.
Just as Kana is thinking she may have gone too far, Aqua makes her elated when he asks her how she gets all worked up. He’ll later wish he hadn’t asked this, as Kana tells him to imagine his mom dying, obviously unfamiliar with the fact that a.) Aqua doesn’t have to imagine it, since he lived it as a child, and b.) while he’s searching for someone to exact revenge, at the end of the day he blames himself for his Ai’s death.
Just as he’s recalling all of the moments in his life since then that have made him happy, including the smiling faces of Ruby, Kana, and Akane, that voice in his head that blames him shuts all that down. He believes his punishment for allowing Ai die is to never be able to feel authentic joy or have genuine fun. Externally, he exhibits all the symptoms of a panic attack.
Akane, his ostensible girlfriend, goes to make sure he’s okay, and immediately clocks that he isn’t, and would be better off going home. Not wanting to stir up the past with his future-focused sister, Aqua instead insists on going to Gotanda’s to rest instead. While he does, Gotanda tells Akane about a terrible event in Aqua’s past that gave him PTSD he’s been keeping in check up until now.
Akane visits Aqua in the bedroom and hears him saying a name during his fitful sleep: Ai. We know Akane to be an obsessive investigator and profiler (and indeed would make a fine sober anime verison of Jessica Jones), and all of the disparate factoids about Aqua, Ruby, Strawberry Productions, B Komachi, and the murder of Ai start coalescing within the gears in her brain.
Stars appear in her eyes as she transforms into Aikane, and when Aqua wakes up, she’s ready with a warm embrace and a promise that she will always be by his side to help bear the pain he’s feeling. He can ask her what she’s talking about and pretend not to know all he likes, but Ai has all but figured out he’s Hoshino Ai’s son.
