Urusei Yatsura – 39 – Ghost Fiancée

Ryuunosuke invites Lum, Shinobu, Ataru, and Shuutarou to an island her father bought for 300 yen and where they now run their beach café. After a shift Ryuu takes a bath and senses someone snooping, but when she tosses a bucket, it’s at a girl she’s never seen holding a bunch of sea urchins. The bucket goes right through her and she vanishes into thin air.

This girl turns out to be Shiowatari Nagisa (voiced by Murase Ayumu), the only child of Ryuu’s dad’s best friend. They both became ghosts after eating too much sea urchin shaved ice. Before that, both her father and Ryuu’s promised to marry them together, making Nagisa Ryuu’s fiancée. Ryuu, being straight, doesn’t want to marry a girl, but every time she tries to tell Nagisa she’s actually a woman she’s interrupted.

Eventually Ryuu’s dad knocks her out and lets Nagisa kiss her, only for Nagisa’s ghost head to go right through Ryuu’s. It looks like Nagisa will remain a ghost forever, but her dad brings up an oddly convenient legend of a giant sea urchin laying its eggs by the light of the full moon and tearing up due to the pain. When Nagisa touches that urchin’s tears, she assumes physical form.

Nagisa uses her new solidity to chase Ryuu down and wall slam, her, leading Ryuu to finally lift up her shirt to show her that she’s a woman. But that doesn’t matter to Nagisa, and when she leans in for a kiss, Ryuu feels her chest, and … it’s the chest of man. Just as Ryuu is a girl raised as a boy, Nagisa is a boy raised as a girl! Not only that, he maintains his solid form even when morning comes, so another appearance down the road is likely.

Having an opposite of Ryuu makes me wonder: what if there was an opposite Shuutarou, who was afraid of light and wide open spaces? An opposite of Ataru, who was a perfect gentleman? That aside, the slighter second part of the episode involves Ten meeting a fairy who will make his dream come true if he finds his magic parasol.

After quite a bit of flying around, Ten ends up with the parasol, but the fairy was speaking literally, and ends up making Ten’s most recent dream—a chaotic nightmare involving dragons, a city aflame and a giant leg—a reality, trashing the Moroboshi home for the umpteenth time. The moral is, be careful which magical creatures you help!

Urusei Yatsura – 38 – SisTerminator: Dark Futility

A date between Shuutarou and his androphobic betrothed Asuka was never going to stay normal for long, but it’s impressive just how quickly things go off the rails. While making Shuu tea, Asuka’s whisking turns the cup into a pile of clay dust, to which she adds hot tea and fashions a new cup. Shuu’s incredibly forced-polite reaction is perfect.

When one of his bodyguards interrupts, a frightened Asuka gloms onto Shuutarou tight and like the teacup, his ribs are turned to dust. Ataru, disguised as one of Ryouko’s ninjas, uses this as an opportunity to get closer to Asuka by manipulating the KO’d Shuu in a Weekend at Bernie’s-type situation. The puppet sound effects are exquisite.

Once Lum reveals Ataru’s disguise, Asuka sends him and Shuu flying, and Shuu regains consciousness (and his ribs miraculously reconstitue) in mid-air. They watch in the distance as Asuka, essentially trapped on an island, launches every bodyguard she encounters into the air.

Lum lends another helping hand, showing Asuka a tank in the Mendou family’s possession. Rather than hop in, she tears the tank to pieces with her bare hands and fashions a new suit of armor to protect her from scary men. Ataru and Shuu secretly watch this quirky, steampunk twist on the “changing scene” with disappointment.

Ryouko, who is determined to keep her brother away from Asuka, lures her to her room and prepares to fill her head with nonsense, which is Ryouko’s specialty. When Shuu comes in with Ataru still attached to his back, Asuka smashes them both into a wall, but then her mother arrives, and despite her face locked in a placid smile, she’s not happy.

Convinced Asuka isn’t taking this date seriously, her mom (who, again, is one of anime’s all-time worst moms for what she did to Asuka) decides that Asuka will go on a date with Ataru. If she can survive such a repellant man, she can survive any man. The logic is sound, and of course Ataru is game.

When Asuka resists and threatens to fight her mom, we see where she got her superhuman strength. She’s no match for her mom, who effortlessly places her in a hold, chains her to Ataru, and then brings in her brother Tobimaro as a hostage: if she breaks the chain, Ton dies. This family sucks!

Even if Asuka wanted to obey her mother, her instincts and body act all on their own. Despite being connected to Ataru, she still tries to run from him, and nothing—not wood, bricks, mortar, or ballistic steel—can stop her. She cuts through all of them like butter, causing untold millions in damage to the Mendou household.

Asuka’s mom meets them on a bridge with a final warning, but Asuka still isn’t willing to relent, repurposing Ataru as a chain weapon and attacking her mom, who uses the bound Ton as a shield. Yes, a mother and daughter are fighting using her son and forced date, respectively, as weapons.

Just when you thought we’d reached the height of resourceful absurdity, Asuka starts spinning Ataru around so fast he becomes a helicopter rotor, then nabs Ton and starts to float away. Asuka’s mom asks Lum, who doesn’t want her darling taken away, to intervene, so she flies up and cuts the chain.

Asuka falls in the drink, and when she emerges, all she can do is prostrate herself before her awful, victorious mother and beg forgiveness. But of course, all of this was for naught. Asuka is no less afraid of men than she was at the beginning of this fiasco of a “date”, and the next morning she’s right back in Ton’s bed. No progress was made, and no lessons were learned. In other words, it was classic Urusei Yatsura!

Urusei Yatsura – 37 – SisTerminator 2: Misjudgment Day

Mizunokouji Asuka’s parents deserve jail time for the abject neglect they’ve subjected to their daughter Asuka. At the same time, Asuka has quickly risen to become one of my favorite Urusei Yatsura characters. That’s simply because she’s such a chaotic force of nature, even more so than anyone else, due to her superhuman strength and obsession with her “Big Brothers.”

Because she fundamentally misunderstands what “big brother” is, she believes it’s okay to bathe and sleep with Ton. When his nose spurts two-thirds of his blood, her solution is to embrace him so tightly she crushes his ribs. Eventually their mother realizes that it’s not Ton luring Asuka to his bed, but Asuka inviting herself.

Deciding that now is the time for her to meet other men unrelated by blood, she sends Asuka on an errand to deliver a letter to Shuu at his school. This goes about as well as you’d expect, as every time the fully-armored (though in a smaller suit than her first appearance) Asuka encounters a man she lashes out and causes generous amounts of collateral damage.

When she ends up in Ryuu’s lap, she assumes she’s a man like most people, but Ryuu isn’t about to let her get away with misgendering her. Ryuu chases her around the school until Asuka ends up in a tree, where her mother and Ton urge her to try to open up to the strange man who “seems different.” But once Ryuu watches Asuka snap a medium-sized tree like a toothpick, she ends up running from Asuka.

The bit is completed when Asuka finally lays her head on Ryuu’s chest, but when she notices that Ryuu’s chest is bound, she doesn’t realize she’s a woman, but another big brother, like the similarly bandaged Ton. Asuka is so sheltered she has no idea what anything is. On the one hand, this is deeply tragic. On the other, it’s freakin’ hilarious.

Asuka’s mother isn’t about to keep letting Asuka get away with glomming onto her blood brother, so she beseeches Shuu to go on a date with her. Ataru happens to be there too, but not because he invited himself: Ryouko invited him, because she’s just as obsessed with her brother as Asuka is with hers, and won’t allow him to date or marry the likes of Asuka.

Nevertheless, Asuka arrives in a grand procession led by her mother, and is dolled up in traditional garb very similar to FFX’s Yuna. Shuu is initially excited to go on a date with such a cutie, but when she charges at him like a locomotive, his survival instinct causes him to dodge her, and she shatters a giant stone piece of decorative Mendou art instead.

Since Asuka has absolutely no concept of letting off the accelerator or lessoning the force with which she does things, Shuu is in for a world of pain. But he won’t be alone. Ryouko is watching nearby, Ataru has disguised himself as one of Ryouko’s bodyguards, and Lum has disguised herself as one of Asuka’s bodyguards (the ladies in safari garb). I’m greatly looking forward to a chaotic, action-packed date!

Urusei Yatsura – 36 – His Own Worst Enemy

Urusei Yatsura’s second season resumes after a week off with fresh OP and ED themes from MAISONdes and the origin story of Mendou Shuutarou’s nyctophobia and claustrophobia. Mendou is feverishly training until he literally drops, and when his friends Lum, Ataru, Shinobu, and Ryuunosuke visit to check on him, he wishes he could travel back in time, and Lum tells him that he can with one of her gizmos.

The quintet ends up in the past when Mendou is just a little squirt. His younger self immediately suspects his older self and the others are intruding “hooligans” and summons his army of men in black to deal with them. They manage to give the bodyguards the slip, but Mendou proves such an entitled brat that Ataru can’t help but bop him with a plastic mallet. When an adorable Lil’ Ryouko arrives to defend her brother, she only ends up playing a number of silly pranks on him, as is her M.O.

When Mendou and Ataru are captured, it’s up to Lum, Shinobu, and Ryuunosuke to rescue them, and as is always the case, they’re more than up to the task. I loved how they did the classic “steal uniforms from the enemy”, which don’t fit, only for Lum to whip out another one of her Oni gizmos to make the suits fit beautifully. That said, their hair and figures still somewhat give them away.

Ataru temporarily aligns himself with Lil’ Mendou to tag-team torture Big Mendou, assuring him he’s only doing it to buy time for their eventual escape. The three ladies come in and kick ass, but by that time, Mendou has well and truly snapped, and chases after Lil’ Mendou and Ataru, into the very room full of clay jars where, in the future, he’ll train to overcome his phobias.

This is where we learn that he himself is the reason he fears dark cramped places so much, as Lil’ Mendou has to hide from his unhinged older self stalking him with an axe. Mendou and the others return to the present without resolving his deep-seated phobias, but now we know for certain: due to a temporal paradox, he has only himself (and Lum, who sent him to the past after all) to blame for his fears.

Urusei Yatsura – 35 – What’s at Cake / A Fox’s Tale

Atari spots Ran in the park but loses her, but not before she drops a neatly-packaged cake from her basket. A cake she said would “knock him dead”. Hearing her use those exact words puts us in the Lum’s state of mind, because when she finds Ataru, he’s flat on his back and in bad shape.

Lum, noted inventor and tinkerer, turns to her robodoc, who confirms poison, but no treatment: just funeral preparations. Hooking him up to a vital sign monitor of her own design that she can check on with a handheld remote, Lum heads out to save her Darling. She manages to find the warp gate Ran used to travel to a fantastical (and gorgeous) forest, but she’s always a step behind her.

When a napping Cherry snags a wire, Ataru’s vitals flatline on Lum’s remote. But as expected, “knock him dead” was just an expression: Ran made the cakes for Rei specifically, and the galoot does seem to enjoy them. But Lum doesn’t know that, assumes Darling is dead, and her wailing lament draws both Rei and Ran to her. Ran is pissed at first, but when she sees Lum won’t stop crying, she seems genuinely concerned for her old friend.

She’s able to calm Lum down, assuring her there must be some mistake. Sure enough, they return just as Ataru is reovering a bit, but is still wretchedly bloated. Turns out the cakes were specifically formulated to be one hundred times more filling than normal, in order to satisfy Rei. Pissed that Ataru ate one, Rei goes after him, while Ran lays into Lum for ruining her date.

It’s a raucous, unpleasant ending, but it can’t ruin the previous display of Lum’s genuine love and devotion for Ataru (and despair upon believing him dead) as well Ran showing she’ll be there for Lum if she needs her.

The second half marks the return of the adorable little fox (we’ll call him Kitsune) from last season. It starts with a positively gorgeous folktale of a fox who fell for a human girl and used charmed horsetail shoots to turn her into a fox for a night. Kitsune just happens to have some of spring’s first shoots, and sets out intending to play out the folktale with his beloved Shinobu.

Between the folktale and Kitsune finding Ataru and Lum, his journey to the big scary city and issues with big dogs and cars is played out with scarcely any dialogue. Kitsune, the dogs, and his Kotatsu Cat hero simply make expressive sounds. The music is also superb in this sequence, as it perfectly complements Kitsune’s unique POV in the otherwise familiar town setting.

When he spots Ataru and Lum at a vending machine, he disguises himself as Shinobu (which of course means he looks like a little fox Shinobu and isn’t fooling anyone). Shinobu feels bad about simply sending the little guy on his way, and agrees to help him find the horsetail shoots he lost.

They take him to Shinobu’s, where he disguises himself as Ataru and Lum and even adopts (and mixes up) their unique manners of speech. Kugimiya Rie is the perfect button-cute voice for Kitsune, no matter who he’s imitating. The four eventually encounter Cherry and Kotatsu Cat, who are cooking something (I love how everyone ignores Cherry until they simply can’t anymore).

They initially offer Kitsune some of their soup to comfort him after they were unable to find his shoots. But Kitsune, Cherry, and Kotatsu make the soup seem so tasty, Ataru, Lum, and Shinobu have a bowl as well. And because Kotatsu Cat put the horsetail shoots in the soup, they all turn into foxes!

This reveal, complete with soaring music, cozy lighting, and adorable character designs is masterfully directed and timed for maximum emotional impact. The whole episode was a feast for the eyes and ears, but you simply cannot go wrong with a Kugimiya Rie-voiced little fox. I’d watch a whole season of his adventures and terrible disguises!

Urusei Yatsura – 34 – The Flowers of Pee-vil

As is the case with most Urusei Yatsura episodes, this one is split into two distinct parts. The first begins in media res with Onsen-sensei castigating Ataru, Lum, Shinobu, Mendou, and Ryuu for causing chaos, the evidence of which is the destroyed classroom and the rest of the class behind a barricade of desks.

The always-easygoing principal gives them a slap on the wrist for their infractions: cleaning his office. However, when Onsen-sensei checks in on them, he finds that the principal has been knocked out, with a small bump in his noggin. The sequence shifts into a whodunit.

Onsen goes over the possible scenarios of Lum and Ryuu, but it’s ultimately five-against-one as the kids accuse Onsen of attacking the principal for being so lenient. Ataru, Ryuu, and Mendou don detective suits and put him under the bright light of interrogation, and eventually make him crack in exchange for a still-warm pork cutlet bowl.

The thing is, Onsen did no such thing. The principal knocked himself out by trying to crack the unusually hard boiled egg on his head. In keeping with his personality, he adopts a very laid back attitude to this incident and the fact Kotatsu Cat ate his egg while he was out.

On to part two, which is something completely different: Ran is cultivating a beautiful white flower with her mouth bandaged. When Lum greets her, she learns why: this flower mimics whatever anyone says, then its flowers catch the wind and spread those words like gossip.

Ran honestly only brought them to Earth because they’re pretty, but once Lum brings up the possible nefarious use of them, Ran goes all in, telling tales of Lum being bad in the past. Lum fires back with the story of how Ran crushed a teacher’s bonsai.

The flowers get loose, but rather than repeat what either Lum or Ran said verbatim, they mix up the accusations, like a game of telephone. That’s how Ataru and Shinobu learn that Mendou is late for school because he wet the bed, or the teachers are “crushed by revenge.”

While each of Urusei’s characters has unique physical or magical abilities, it’s ultimately words that get them in the most trouble. As long as they’re always talking and lobbing threats and bile at one another, they’ll be at the mercy of the goss flowers. Chaos begetting chaos!

A third post-credits skit involves a starving Onsen unable to announce he’s at the Moroboshi’s for a home visit because their TV is too loud, and then being abducted by the Oni, which will continue next week.

Urusei Yatsura – 33 – Heaven Is a Date on Earth with You

With the possible futures mini-arc concluded, Urusei is back to self-contained segments, both of which have to do with the supernatural. First up, Mendou is out of school for a week, and when Ataru, Lum, Shinobu, and Ten visit, they learn he has an invisible ghostly octopus stuck to his head.

His sister painted a floral design to make it visible, but the sheer absurd sight of it tends to provoke laughter in everyone. Sakura and Cherry arrive to describe the phenomenon as a “cowalker”, or the spirit of the missing family octopus Akamaru.

When Cherry gets into a staring and funny face contest with the ghostly octopus, both get conked on the head, but since the octopus doesn’t have physical form, Ataru misses and conks Mendou on the head instead. Mendou draws his katana and a scuffle ensues.

When Ataru uses a pillow to block Mendou’s strike, it rips open to reveal Akamaru had gotten stuck in there while adventuring, as is his wont. Once he wakes up, his cowalker vanishes, and all’s well that ends well. As for why the adventurous octopus ended up in Mendou’s pillow, I think there might’ve been some wordplay lost in translation.

The true gem of this episode, and perhaps this entire season of Urusei, is “Last Date”, which starts from the delicate pastel POV of a sickly girl who often watches Ataru running past the hospital with a big smile on his face. Clearly smitten, she dreams of one day meeting him, as she learns his name from his mother.

Fast-forward to Ataru and Lum being summoned to Sakura’s for a favor: she needs him to go on a date with the ghost of the girl, whose name is Nozomi. The fact that she’s already dead is sad enough, but only by fulfilling her dreams in her diary of dating Ataru can she pass on to the hereafter.

When Lum sees the circumstances, she’s fine with Ataru going out with Nozomi (voiced by the perfectly-cast Iwami Manaka, Honda Tooru herself), and even as Nozomi provides him with more and more warm knit articles of clothing in the middle of summer, he toughs it out because he’s a decent guy, and because Nozomi is so gosh-darn pure, sweet, and charming.

After going on walks, to the movies, out for a bite, and finally on all the rides at the amusement park, the hour is getting late and Nozomi still hasn’t passed on. The reason is revealed at the end of her diary, as Nozomi, who died on Christmas day, last wrote of her wish to walk with Ataru in the midst of the falling snow.

Since they can’t wait until winter for snow to come, Ataru and Nozomi come upon an aesthetic substitute of a bright and beautiful fireworks show. Nozomi holds Ataru’s arm tight, and content that she’s seen and done everything she wrote about, she slowly vanishes from his sight, having passed on to heaven.

The realization that Nozomi is gone washes over Ataru, and the shot of him standing alone as the fireworks continue is heartbreaking as all get-out. Fortunately, he’s not alone, as Lum, Sakura, and Cherry soon join him. But after previously complaining about how hot he was in all the clothing Nozomi knit for him, he decides he’ll wear it all a bit longer. I’m sorry, but is it getting really dusty in here?

CERTIFIED GODDAMN TEARJERKER

Urusei Yatsura – 32 – No Place Like Home

Ataru, Lum, and Shinobu continue to explore possible futures, including a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic world where Ataru is a warlord, Shinobu is his concubine, and they are hunting Lum down. Needless to say, this doesn’t appeal to any of them, so they move on to the next door.

When Ataru finally does find what he believes to be his “ideal” future—one in which he lives with a harem all of the girls—he learns there’s a catch. He lives in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, and his harem has everyone in it but Lum, who has left him. This is an unacceptable future for Ataru, because no harem is complete without her.

Shinobu’s ideal future is one in which everyone is older but maintains the exact same dynamics as they have in the present. No one is married to anyone else, but Ataru continues to mack on her and every other girl while Lum chases after him. Inaba can sense that this future in which everything remains the same as it currently is is fun for Shinobu, who can see herself being content with the status quo.

When Inaba’s co-workers start sending all of the future doors into the abyss, Ataru happens to fall into the one where he and Lum are happily married, and he tries to protect it at all costs. Despite all of the rancor and bickering, Lum sees that Ataru does care about a future that puts her front and center. It’s clear that she’s important to him, even if he’d rather not admit it.

But eventually Inaba’s co-workers continue their advance, and Inaba has no choice but to head them off while allowing Shinobu, Ataru and Lum to return to their own time. Even if it’s good to be home, Shinobu is devastated to suddenly lose someone with whom she felt a profound bond.

But it turns out she bawled her eyes out for nothing: Inaba may have been given extra work to do, but that was the extent of his punishment, and he’s still able to have tea with Shinobu, Ataru, and Lum the next day, for which she’s happy. Lum and Ataru also come out of the whole time travel thing feeling better, since they now know there is a future where they’ll end up together.

Urusei Yatsura – 31 – Shinobu in Futureland

Miyake Shinobu has terrible luck in men, who always seem be freaks like the lip monster or pervs like Ataru. She asks Sakura to examine whether it’s the result of a curse, but the onmyouji nurse can’t find anything. Sakura tells Shinobu it’s just her fate, but she’s still young, and her ideal man will surely come along someday.

Shinobu assumes Sakura is simply telling her this to make her feel better, but on her way home from food shopping she encounters a handsome, princely lad starving behind some trash cans. Then he eats one of her raw carrots and she sees that he’s wearing a white rabbit suit. So, another freak!

When the rabbit lad asks her on a date and won’t take no for an answer, Shinobu has the same thing for him she has for anyone who messes with her: a knuckle sandwich that sends him flying. He almost collides with an airborne Lum, but vanishes into a hyperspace portal.

Shinobu discovers he left a mysterious old fashioned key behind. Upon returning, the rabbit guy, named Inaba, rejoins his co-workers, also guys in rabbit suits. When he realizes he doesn’t have the key, they all panic, for the key in the hands of a “normie” could be catastropic.

But then they realize there’s no way a normie would be able to use a key, because they assume Shinobu doesn’t know an alien girl who can build a door for the key. Once opened, Shinobu, Lum, and Ataru all fall through and enter the same dimension full of doors where we saw Inaba running around in last week’s closing scene.

Since Shinobu opened another door while falling, the trio decide to go through it. They end up in a place that looks and feels like their town, but everything’s a little different. Then a ganguro cycles past, Ataru chases after her, and Lum chases after him, leaving Shinobu all alone in this strange place.

It isn’t long until she encounters someone addressing a woman with a kid as “Shinobu”—someone who looks and sounds a lot like her. When the kid addresses an older version of Ataru’s mom as “grandma”, it confirms it: she’s in a future where she married Ataru. This is … not optimal for Shinobu, and Inaba pops out of a trash can to confirm she doesn’t accept this particular fate.

Meanwhile, Ataru and Lum spot Sakura’s fiance with two kids, one of whom looks like Sakura. Ataru assumes the guy is two-timing Sakura, but when they follow him home they find they got married after all. Once her husband has seen their kids to their respective rooms, he and Sakura start getting hot and heavy, which not only Ataru and Lum but also Shinobu and Inaba can’t help but watch until Sakura sends them packing.

What of old Ataru? Well, Mendou arrives by Toyota Century to personally fire him from his corporation, once and for all severing all connections with his high school nemesis. Present-day Ataru ends up catching Future Mendou’s sword, but Lum spots Ataru talking with a future Lum (when she switched from bikini to a dress, we may never know).

Unfortunately for our Lum, this Ataru is speaking to Lum like a friend, not his wife. He also mentions her husband, who turns out to be Rei, while Ran is revealed to be a miserable spinster devoted to making Lum and Rei’s lives a living hell. It’s just not a particularly optimal future for anyone.

Before they can make another move, the four are swiftly captured by Inaba’s co-workers with the “Fortune Manufacturing Office.” They ponder whether to send these contaminated normies to a dark dimension or simply drug them, and settle for serving them tea Mad Hatter-style before bonking them on the heads with wooden mallets.

Alas, these FMO officers don’t know who their effing with. Between Ataru’s elusiveness, Lum’s flight ability, and Shinobu’s strength, the three are able to easily give their captors the slip, taking Inaba along with them. He leads them to an FMO locker room where they all don bunny suits so they can travel freely through possible futures.

Did I mention that Lum and Shinobu are made to wear bunny girl costumes, not bunny mascot costume like Ataru? Anywho, they try another door hoping to find a better future, only to find an even worse one where Lum is married to Lum and now does ojou-sama laughs, while Ataru is a literal footstool, and Shinobu is the spinster still pursued by the lip monster.

The next handful of futures they try out are basically the same, except for small aesthetic details. So as Inaba said, finding one’s ideal future is extremely difficult and not something that can be left to chance. Even so, Shinobu, Lum, and Ataru are all heartened that none of these futures are set in stone.

Lum could presumably find a future where she’s married to her darling, Shinobu could find one where she’s married to her ideal man, and Ataru could find one where he has a harem of all the women in his life and more. But it’s more likely they’ll ultimately end up back where they started, in the present day where anything and everything is still possible.

Urusei Yatsura – 30 – What Dreams May Come

Ataru and Ten come across a strange vendor selling earmuffs for 150 yen a pop. Ataru plays hardball and manages to snag two sets for 200 yen, of which he expects Ten to pay back half. But when they put the earmuffs on, they swap bodies. Thus, the question is answered, “What would Ataru do if he had Ten’s body?” He seeks out cuties, of course, who are all to willing to give him a squeeze because he’s a cute-ass flying baby!

Ataru-as-Ten also ensures Ten-as-Ataru is kept at bay by Lum, who initially thinks Ataru hit his head so hard he thinks he’s Ten. When Ten encounters Sakura, her sixth sense doesn’t let her down, but her instinct to attack him causes Lum to castigate her for being so harsh to a child. Of course, Sakura’s instincts are accurate, as the Ten who wants to suckle her bosom is actually Ataru.

Cherry also buys a set of earmuffs, causing him and Ten to swap bodies while Ataru returns to his own. It’s a fun body-swap segment, though I wish it had gone farther. As it is, Kamiya Hiroshi and Yuuki Aoi do a great job imitating Ten and Ataru’s voice patterns.

The second half involves Ataru being on a late-for-school streak due to him trying not to rely on Lum to wake him up (often with electricity). She offers a shortcut using her alien technology to create a portal straight to school, which they travel through together. They arrive at school with five minutes to spare, but then we cut to his classroom as the morning bell rings, and neither he nor Lum are there.

That is because the portal didn’t just traverse space, but time as well. When Ataru enters his classroom, it’s on a Sunday afternoon ten years into the future, where his classmates are having a reunion. The future him happens to be out of the classroom when he arrives, but his older friends note that he looks just like Ataru, while his wife is also out looking for their son.

Ataru ends up unknowingly encountering his future son by chance, and he’s a little shit just like his old man. Lum is quick to embrace and comfort the child, but when he sees a very familiar lascivious look, she gets suspicious. When the little scamp finally says his name: Moroboshi Kokeru. Lum feels around on his head, doesn’t find any horns, and is immediately distraught.

And of course she’s distraught: if this was her son, he’d have horns, no matter how small. She concludes that in this future, she and Ataru don’t have a kid together. It begs the question of who exactly Ataru’s wife is in this future, but more than anything, Lum is devastated by the fact that it’s not her.

When Ataru prods Kokeru to go through the school gates, he calls the first woman he sees his mom, and it’s some unattractive old maid. This makes Ataru as depressed as Lum, and when she catches up to him, they both agree that it’s time to return to their time. But both Kokeru and Ataru are mistaken: the older lady isn’t his mother.

His real mother, and Ataru’s wife, is none other than his childhood friend Miyake Shinobu, lovely and resplendent in her striped suit. Ataru returns to his time with Lum not knowing that, while Lum refuses to accept that this future they experienced was the actual future, only a possible one.

Thus we end on an uncharacteristically somber note. I don’t doubt if Ataru stuck around long enough to discover Shinbou was his future wife, he’d be pretty happy. But Lum would probably feel even worse if she knew that. Will the fact they’re equally miserable at the end bring them closer together?

As for the Alice in Wonderland-style White Rabbit (previously teased in the OP) running through a galaxy of time doors … I assume that will be explained at some point, because it’s pretty random! It also hints that Lum is right: they only witnessed one future out of countless possible futures.

Urusei Yatsura – 29 – Kotatsu Sleds and Cow Bites

That title up above really gets to the immense variety inherent in Urusei Yatsura. Part of the joy of watching is having no idea what’s coming. The giant cat hasn’t had a focus segment for a while, but gets one this week as he buys a suspiciously cheap but well-made kotatsu that refuses to be covered with a blanket, ruining Lum’s 121st Othello win over Ataru.

When they see the Mendou family crest carved into the side, Ataru summons Shuutarou with an insult, and he tells them that because the table is made from the wood of the only cedar tree in the South Pole, it hates heat of any kind. That said if a kotatsu connoisseur like Neko can’t tame it, nobody can.

For several days and nights their cat-and-table chase disrupts the Moroboshi household. Finally, the two shake on a truce, and rather than use the kotatsu in the normal way, he uses it to pull a sled instead. It gets to stretch its legs, and Neko and Lum have a blast riding the sled. Everybody wins!

If a feral kotatsu that hates blankets isn’t random enough for you, how a bout a cow at the local pet store? This cow has a tendency to glomp hands; it glomps Ataru’s hand, then Lum’s hand. She shocks the cow, but is left with a wound on her hand that she goes up into her orbiting spaceship to treat.

After kicking back with some trashy space TV with Ten, including a program about a Dracula that turns an alien into a human girl (which is terrifying to said aliens), Lum has a nightmare about being transformed into a cow. When she gets up to brush her teeth, she notices her horns are a lot bigger, and very cow-like in shape.

Lum takes the next few days off, such that when a morose Ten shows up at school, Ataru and Shuutarou are eager to know what’s become of her. Then she shows up with a new hairdo hiding the larger horns, and Sakura can’t do much for her, since she has no knowledge of Oni anatomy. Ataru isn’t his usual selfish self here; he seems genuinely concerned for Lum and her somber mood.

He follows her out onto the beautifully rendered city streets in the rain (all the 70s and 80s-era cars driving by are a nice touch), and she starts saying weird stuff about if she should go missing and a cow show up at his door, she wants him to name it Lum and take good care of it. With that, she says goodbye and prepares to fly off, but in a very nifty bit of 3D animation, he catches her, and undoes her buns to reveal her horns.

She tells him she’s turning into a cow, but he tenderly takes her horns into his hands and pleads with her not to go anywhere, saying “I’m gonna take good care of you.” Sure, he means it in the context of the expectation she’ll turn into a full-on cow, but setting that aside, its one of his more romantic gestures in the whole run of the show, and the two end up crying in each others’ arms. It’s a very moooo-ving scene (I’m so sorry…)

It’s one of those times you realize why Lum loves Ataru so much. Most episodes he’s chasing some other girl who has no interest in him, but every once in a while he shows he cares … and in this case, starts building a cow pen in the backyard when Lum learns via Ten that her horns growing are a natural Oni function when one gets an infection, and they’ll eventually return to normal. So, there will be no LumCow! Got it? Good!

Urusei Yatsura – 28 – The SisTerminator

Mendou is having a lovely dream where he’s about to marry Lum, Shinobu, Benten, Ran, Ryuu, Kurama, Oyuki, and Sakura (phew) when suddenly a giant suit of armor crashes the ceremony, turning all the ladies into SD versions of themselves and running back and forth. It’s a hilarious and absurd dream, and just a small a taste of the madness that’s to come.

When Mendou learns this isn’t just a casual meeting but the actual engagement ceremony, he tries to flee, but his servants catch him and deposit him at the Mizunokouji manor. Ataru, Lum, and Shinobu rescue him—Shinobu because she likes him, Ataru because he likes the girl in the armor—but their plan fails when Ataru’s half-assed disguise fails and Shinobu is caught.

The ceremony proceeds as schedule, and when Mizunokouji Asuka is wheeled in behind a curtained cage and wearing her suit of armor, Mendou’s dad starts with the dad jokes. Ataru manages to enter disguised as a tea server, but when he pounces on the armored Asuka she smashes through the cage and walls and flees outside. Her commando maids try to eliminate Ataru with suppressive fire, but his speed and agility is comparable to Asuka’s.

When Lum sees him clinging to the armor, she zaps him, but the zapping affects Asuka as well, and her suit of armor shatters, revealing a normal-sized girl with a ponytail wearing a yellow leotard, black tee, and fuchsia leggings, looking every bit like the 80s workout enthusiast, but with strength that would put all-time Olympic Gold Medalists to shame.

She’s able to elude Ataru, who returns to the manor with Lum and Shinobu, both of whom mention to Mendou that under the suit of armor there’s a cute girl. Now he knows why Ataru was helping. Turns out Mizunokouji women aren’t allowed to see any men—not even their father or brothers—until the age of fifteen. Her mother went through the same thing, all in the name of “family custom.”

Asuka’s flight from Ataru leads her to land in the same tree as Tobimaro, and when she sees he has the same eyes as her, her first thought is that he must be a girl like her. In fact, it’s because they’re brother and sister. Remember, Asuka was only recently given a rushed and inadequate explanation for what a “man” is, but since her maids said a “brother” is a special type of man who won’t attack her, she’s immediately smitten with him.

When Mendou and Ataru start chasing her and she starts pulling fully-grown trees out of the earth like they’re popsicle sticks, her maids shoot her with an elephant tranq dart. When she comes to she’s chained to the wall, but so are Mendou and Ataru. The dads let the kids sort things out, with Lum and Shinobu trying to demonstrate that boys aren’t scary, but that fact is dubious considering the scary faces they’re being made to make.

The group tries to explain to Asuka that she can’t marry her brother, but she doesn’t know what marriage is. Then Ryouko, who heard her brother had been captured, launches a guerilla operation (love her combat gear) that results in heavy damage to the manor. When Asuka overhears Ryouko calling Mendou “onii-sama”, her whole attitude towards him changes, because she thinks brothers aren’t men.

The strength of this episode lies in the attention to detail with regards to Asuka’s feats of strength, the similar feats Ataru and Mendou pull off trying to keep up with her, and a commentary on blind arranged marriage, extreme family customs, and other rich people nonsense. Also, it’s true: Asuka is cute as all-get-out, and voiced just as cutely by M · A · O in her triumphant Urusei debut.

Urusei Yatsura – 27 – Fullmetal Cutiemist

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Princess Kurama and her murder of crow attendants, but there’s not much to catch up on: she’s still single. She scolds the crows for just lazing around eating and sleeping, but they assure her they’ve developed a computer program that is searching the universe for the ultimate studmuffin.

Of course, they’re talking out of their bird-asses. They’ve been lazing around eating and sleeping and there is no such computer, but they do their best to build one that can scan for her ideal mate. The hastily slapped-together computer’s choice is … well, it’s a choice.

Make no mistake, Rei is a handsome young man. But he has more letters in his name than brain cells, will always want food more than the heart of any woman at any given waking moment, and is not always a young man, but a giant tiger-bill thing.

In any case, Kurama’s ship abducts him while he’s having a date with Ran on the branch of a very spooky tree, and ends up abducting her too. It’s great having legends Mizuki Nana and Hanazawa Kana in the same episode, playing two women claiming Rei’s heart while Rei only seeks to claim his next meal.

When Ran is tossed off Kurama’s ship, her fall is arrested by Lum. Lum would rather not get entangled in a relationship drama with Rei, Ran, and Kurama, but Ran is able to convince her to tag along and help her get Rei back. At the same time, Ataru spots the crows buying more rice and insists on paying a visit to Kurama-chan.

Lum was right to dread this scenario. Ran comes to save her man, only for Rei to embrace Kurama when she offers more food. When he spots Lum, he embraces her. Ataru tries to get with Kurama, then Ran. It’s a big ol’ mess, full of wooden mallets.

Thanks to a trap door from the main hall to Kurama’s bedroom, Rei’s version of the Trolley Problem comes to bear on this chaos. He must choose between a Ran, and giant bindle of onigiri Ran made to lure him to her, before slipping and falling down the shaft.

Surprising everyone, Rei chooses Ran over the food, and for a moment seems to exhibit signs of human (or rather Oni) sentience. But then he notices the pile of onigiri and starts stuffing his face. Kurama finally sees him in his tiger-bull form, gives up her pursuit of him, and goes to bed cranky. Ran may not be able to claim Rei, but she can take comfort in knowing neither will the Crow Princess.

All that could have been a fine episode in and of itself, but wait, there’s more: the obscenely ultra-wealthy Mendou clan has chosen a wife for their firstborn son, something he’s not interested in … until his otherwise serious and traditionally-dressed pops starts going on about the “nudie lewdie.”

Ryouko sends one of her ninjas to clobber her brother with a hammer while delivering a message of her displeasure with his impending nuptials. However, Mendou is even less enthused with the idea than she is when he learns the family name of his fiancée: Mizunokouji, as in the chief rival of the Mendous and Tobimaru’s sister.

Mendou visits Tobimaru at his family’s estate (with Ataru tagging along) and both accuse him of keeping all knowledge of his sister from them. They demand to be told everything about her. The thing is, Tobimaru didn’t even know he had a sister either. Mendou learned of her existence before him.

Their bickering is interrupted by the arrival of three women in olive green safari gear and another one of Mendou’s spies sent to investigate the Mizunokouji girl. They’re soon approached by a giganic suit of armor with “MAIDEN” painted in red on the chestplate. This must be Tobimaru’s sister.

When she trundles off with her tough-but-beautiful bodyguards, Mendou laments having to marry a suit of armor, while Tobimaru laments finding out his only sister is made of metal. Ataru, meanwhile, is smart enough to know there’s a girl under all that metal, and he wants to know what she looks like.

He happens upon an Olympic-style track and field center where he watches the armored girl sprinting ridiculous speeds and performing ridiculous jumps while wearing 200 kilos of armor. Ataru manages to catch up to her and catches a quick glimpse of her delicate face and starry eyes.

The girl then freaks out and shot puts him so far he ends up landing in the pond with the other boys. It looks like the Mizunokouji girl has an all-female staff and was terrified of Ataru because she’s never seen a man before. That should make her first meeting with Mendou interesting!