“I’m NOT clean­ing the toi­let again!”

I love time loop episodes, with the excep­tion of the ani­me ver­sion of The Melan­choly of Haruhi Suzu­miya’s End­less Eight in which they decid­ed to troll us with eight episodes of the same crap. Unlike End­less Eight, though, CLAM­P’s lov­able mag­i­cal girl and her future boyfriend are immune to the mem­o­ry-reset­ting effects of the time loop and there­fore advert­ed cer­tain doom. =P

Inter­est­ing­ly, I’ve always noticed in this episode that not only did it con­tain signs of Nanase Ohkawa pro­mot­ing Syao­ran’s role as com­peition in the ani­me, but also alludes to oth­er aspects in regards to a cer­tain oth­er CLAMP series (hint: it also con­tains Syao­ran).

“I’m look­ing at you, CLAMP.”

Syao­ran shows an immense inter­est in Saku­ra’s father line of work: archae­ol­o­gy. This was import­ed to his char­ac­ter in Tsub­asa ‑RESER­Voir CHRoN­i­CLE-, where strange­ly enough has Fuji­ta­ka as his adop­tive father (well, this was ini­tial­ly a fact any­way).

May I also note that the source of the utter con­fu­sion and mind screws in TRC was due to a giant time loop? This episode, man. It’s awe­some, but it fore­shad­ows a bunch of things that I did­n’t like about TRC, whether it was unin­ten­tion­al or not.

Igno­rance is bliss.

Yes, Saku­ra, Yuk­i­to-san is in the oth­er room…

Get­ting down to busi­ness with your old­er broth­er. xD

I felt so sor­ry for Kero in this ep. The pain it must be to con­stant­ly lose the save file of an SNES RPG you’ve almost fin­ished and try­ing to get back to that point the same num­ber of times.

I’m just sur­prised he did­n’t try blow­ing on the car­tridge, though!

Saku­ra and Syao­ran both suck­ing at play­ing the flute will become the sourc of my own hanyan in lat­er on. <3

This ends up even­tu­al­ly hit­ting his face in a lat­er time loop.

See? 😛

I dun­no if it’s because I’ve seen play­ing too much Tales games, but this time around Saku­ra’s fairy out­fit remind­ed me of one of the Sylph from Tales of Sym­pho­nia.

And The Time remind­ed me of Maxwell. 😐

Oh ho ho!

Did I just catch you smil­ing at Saku­ra, Syao­ran? ;D So you can do that!

Oh… so that’s what he was smil­ing about.

Yeah, Syao­ran did­n’t catch any cards in the man­ga. In terms of the ani­me, I like this addition/extension to the sto­ry, despite the fact that it does­n’t real­ly amount to any­thing in the Last Judg­ment. More impor­tan­ly, it adds a few Syaora/Sakura scenes that I adore, where Syao­ran and Saku­ra offer each oth­er their cards. Hannnnyannn~

Time loops… I guess that’s anoth­er unique way for Saku­ra to fail her sub­jects. xD

My head­canon tells me Syao­ran ran into this prob­lem too.