The episode opens with a jealous Kasahara watching Nishimura talking with Takada in class. Later, Kasahara approaches Nishimura and asks her if she’s going out with Takada. She says no, because he’s not her type. Well, Takada and Hino walk by just as Nishimura says this, and Kasahara tries to twist it around to make it sound like Nishimura finds Takada boring to play with. Instead of getting mad, Takada instead becomes insistent that he’ll make sure to do even more fun things with Nishimura so she won’t be bored. Kasahara, of course, is upset that her attempt to destroy their friendship backfired. I loved Hino’s line right before the opening credits, when he turns to Kasahara and asks something to the effect of, “What did you think you were going to accomplish with this?”
After the opening credits, Takada asks Nishimura to play with him at recess, but she has to do student rep work (in this case, carrying a bunch of things to the teachers’ office). Umi comes by and offers to help, and they split the load between the two of them. When they drop these items off, they’re shown something they need to take back to the classroom… a field trip guide.
In class, the teacher says they need to come up with seating assignments for the bus. Takada immediately calls out that he wants to sit with Nishimura, but Kasahara butts in and suggests that they should sit with people they hardly talk to in class. The teacher likes the idea, and has the students talk amongst themselves.
Umi comes up to Nishimura and says they’ve hardly talked to each other in class, so that should count. As Umi and Nishimura start talking, we see Takada looking a little sulky. Kasahara takes this opportunity to make it so she’ll be sitting with Takada on the bus for the field trip. In addition to that, Kasahara comes over and tells Nishimura that her class rep duty on the field trip is to take care of anyone who gets sick. While Kasahara claims that it’s better for her to do roll call because Nishimura is so quiet, her real motivation is that she doesn’t want the job she’s giving to Nishimura. By the end of this scene, we see Umi say that Kasahara is acting mean, and Nishimura feeling as if Takada is getting farther away from her. I like how this episode makes it clear throughout the run of it that Umi really is a nice person.
On the day of the field trip, we see Nishimura’s father packing her lunch. Nishimura comments on all the marinated eggs he’s putting into her bento, and he says it’s a magic spell. After Nishimura leaves the house, we see her father remembering back to when he took Nishimura to her first day of school. He comments on how shy of a child she is, and knows she’s hard trouble making friends since then. This was a touching scene, and it shows how good of a person Nishimura’s father really is. While the kids are the main focus of the series, I appreciated getting this scene of her father because it helped me get to know him a little better.
As the kids head to the field trip, Takada becomes carsick. The bus stops about 15 minutes away from their destination, and Takada is brought out to a park bench to lay down. The teacher asks Nishimura to stay with Takada until he feels well enough to walk, and then join them at the location of the field trip. The teacher gives Nishimura some money, just in case something comes up. Kasahara protests that she wants to stay with Takada, and Kitagawa butts in, saying that she should save those kinds of jobs for the Grim Reaper. Kasahara gets mad at Kitagawa, and he doesn’t understand why. He honestly thinks he’s helping her, since he has no idea that Kasahara likes Takada. And it’s though Kasahara’s thoughts that we learn that the Grim Reaper thing is something Kitagawa started. Since he’s the one who used it so much, I suspected that was the case, but it was nice to get confirmation that Kitagawa was the instigator for this. In the end, the teacher insists on having Nishimura stay, since she was assigned this class rep duty. My favorite part of this scene, though, was seeing the teacher scold Kitagawa for calling one of his classmates “the Grim Reaper.” About time!
As Takada recovers, he and Nishimura have a talk. He reveals that he’d been keeping his distance so Nishimura and Umi could become better friends, and Nishimura realizes that he’s been distant because he’s trying to be considerate of her. When Takada is feeling better, Nishimura decides they should take a detour to the location of the field trip, and the two ends up spending all of the teacher’s money on snacks as they went through their detour. Oops!
At the field trip site, Nishimura, Takada, and Umi clear the air about the misunderstandings, and they have a fun time together. At lunch, the three of them, along with Hino, sit together. Takada notices the four marinated eggs in Nishimura’s bento, and he and the others point out how unusual marinated eggs in a bento are. Takada asks to swap sides, and she ends up swapping a marinated egg with the other three for one of their sides. This makes Nishimura realize what her father meant by a “magic spell,” and she asks the other three if she can take a selfie with them.
We then see Nishimura’s father at work, where he picks up his phone and sees he has a couple of texts from Nishimura. He sees the picture of Nishimura, Takada, Umi, and Hino, and we see tears falls onto his phone screen. This scene was so touching, to the point where I was starting to feel a little emotional.
While Kitagawa did show up in this episode, it seems that Kasahara was being painted as the main “villain” for this particular story. Just as she thought things were finally going her way, Takada’s carsickness ultimately brought Takada and Nishimura back together and now they’re closer than ever. As a viewer, I couldn’t help but feel like this was karma. Kasahara needs to start figuring out that all her various schemes to try to break up Takada’s friendship with Nishimura so she can get closer to him aren’t working, and that perhaps she needs to stop.
Since we see Kasahara in the friend group in the opening credits, it leads me to believe that somehow the series will redeem her and she’ll become friends with Nishimura. With the way she’s been portrayed in the series, I’m not sure how the story will manage to redeem her. At this point, the only character I like less than Kasahara is Kitagawa, but he seems to be becoming less important.
Even with that, I still can’t wait to see the next episode in order to find out what’s going to happen next for Nishimura and Takada.
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