A trip to find Matsunaga turns into a beach trip with a twist

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On the way to find Matsunaga they make it out of Yomiyama safely and Izumi tells Koichi that she nominated herself to be the head of countermeasures for this phenomenon because she believed that no one else thought it was true.

They arrive at the place they hope to find Matsunaga but it seems he was suddenly called away. So not wanting to waste their time there as they are next to the ocean, everyone decides to enjoy themselves at the beach without having to worry about dying any second.

Everyone, apart from Koichi, had prepared to spend time at the beach and brought the required ‘equipment’.

At the beach, Koichi spots a familiar face and finds Misaki’s here also. Her holiday home is nearby. Although she came with her dad, they’re not really connected as he’s rarely home.

Anyway, since they’re at the beach, Teshigawara’s prepared a BBQ set and they’re going to have a competition of food gathering. The contest ends in a draw and with some proper meat and vegetables that Reiko bought they all get cooking.

Matsunaga finally makes his appearance a little later on and they’re able to ask him about how he stopped the phenomenon. But he doesn’t remember much, he knows that someone died during that school trip. When they ask him about the thing he left behind, he does remember, eventually, that he left something back at the school.

A sudden wind blows and their beach ball is blown out to sea. One of the other students swims out immediately to retrieve it but he swims out way too far. Out of nowhere a speed boat appears and speeds past the beach ball without any idea that the student was nearby and slices him up with the boat’s propellers.

Matsunaga, shocked by the death he just witnessed, muttered something on the lines of that he protected everyone and hid that ‘thing’ in the classroom.

Thoughts:

So okay, this wasn’t your typical beach episode, well it was until the propeller death. I know I contradicted myself last episode so I’ll say what I can. Although as I did mention, being a beach episode, majority of it was, there’s not much I can or want to comment on…

First of all, the death. It might be just me, but I felt that it was a little forced, like some of the other deaths in this that wasn’t really an ‘accident’, even thought it was an ‘accident’ if you know what I mean. What would’ve been an accident is the student, who I just realised I have no idea what his name is, gets a foot cramp and drowns. But I guess this being horror the author thought, nah that’s not bloody and traumatising enough, so he does the unnatural thing and pulls a speed boat out of nowhere that just happens to be about these empty waters and just happens to speed right by the student close enough to slice him up even though there was a beach ball there and he should’ve seen that and avoided that area completely. Yeah, in my opinion, unrealistic and forced. I don’t see anything wrong with a quiet drowning, although I think he actually already drowned before he was diced. Death by propeller does add more to the initial impact, but death by drowning would’ve added more suspense and tension to the whole thing in that when they get him to shore there’s still the hope that he may be alive but then it’s snatched away bringing more hopelessness to the situation. And also being a drowning and very likely to be a complete accident will suit it better as they are outside of Yomiyama so this could’ve been an accident and nothing to do with this phenomenon. But nope… like we realised when the teacher knifed himself, this ‘curse’ really wants to make itself known.

This leads nicely into the second thing I wanted to talk about, which is of course they’re out of Yomiyama, out of this so called ‘range’ that the ‘curse’ can reach and yet we encountered another gruesome death. Almost as if this ‘curse’ is saying ‘you can’t run and you can’t hide’. I’ve got no idea how the range of this phenomenon suddenly increased and that propeller death is very unlikely the cause of an actual accident. What can I say, things are getting interesting I guess. I wonder if the librarian’s seen something like this before or this probably is a first.

Some more trivial matters now, like that that first scene was obviously a watermelon. Not even sure why I’m mentioning this, but let’s just say I’m out of things to say… But yeah, I see beach, and I see a red liquid splashed about, you wouldn’t go hmm that’s obviously blood, you think watermelon being smashed. No one would die that early in an episode, without any suspense building, that’d be bad writing otherwise.

Oh and I can think of one more thing to say. Matsunaga remembers that someone died on that school trip and the phenomenon was stopped. So what I’m thinking is that the ‘dead’ person died again, it might’ve been a complete accident that it happened or perhaps Matsunaga figured out a way to find who’s the ‘dead’ guy and then killed him, or tripped him on a cliff or something and so the dead died, stopping the phenomenon. This would also explain why they never found the dead guy that year as he was one of the dead that died that year.

Looks like this ‘curse’ isn’t going to stop anytime soon, even escaping out of Yomiyama didn’t help. Their only hope now is that thing Matsunaga hid in the classroom, I doubt he’ll be able to remember more on that topic so all they can do is search. What is this item? And will it actually be able to stop this year’s phenomenon? Before anyone else falls victim that is. Somehow, I doubt that. I’m predicting a lot more deaths.