Fairy Tail’s playing with time travel again.
What They Say:
“Life Time”
Several of the Fairy Tail wizards are dead, dying, or surrounded on all sides. To save everyone and repent her multitude of sins, Ultear casts a spell that will hopefully turn time back to before the Eclipse portal was opened, even though the cost is her own life…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Fairy Tail gets moments. Like, really well. When it wants to be on, it’s so on. Hiro Mashima, for all his ridiculous fanservice, gets at what is entertaining and what hits straight in the heart.
Last episode, we saw Gray die. It hurt. It still hurts. This episode, we saw Macao die, Bacchus die, Gajeel, Laxus, Wendy, Lucy, Natsu, Sting, Rogue, and everyone else fighting at their absolute worst. They were about to lose. That’s all retconned. It doesn’t feel cheap and it perhaps hurt worse than just seeing Gray die.
Ultear, Ul’s daughter and time magician, sacrifices her life to turn back time. This happens in the entire world; the clock is turned back by one minute. That one minute allows everything to change. Gray’s not killed anymore. Gajeel counterattacks. Everyone counterattacks and it becomes the turning point. Such a small amount of time, when you have a vision of the future, can easily become a turning point.
It works so well because of Ultear’s entire arc, which is completing from the previous episode. She’s finally, in her eyes, redeeming herself from a life of vices. If it can save even one life, she’ll gladly sacrifice her own and does. But from her perspective, what can one measly minute do? She didn’t save any lives. It’s a tragedy for her to die this way, but she did and Mashima will have a difficult time topping that tragedy.
Why don’t the villains also see one minute into the future though? I guess they see their success and figure it’ll work again. Those doofuses.
In Summary:
I’ve been really impressed with Fairy Tail these last two weeks and I can only imagine it’s going to ramp up from here. The SEVERAL FREAKING EPISODES of set up is (hopefully) over now, so I can rest easy in enjoying my shonen fight action. And enjoy I shall!
Grade: A
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Equipment: Radeon 7850, 24” Dell UltraSharp U2410 set at 1920 x 1200, Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II
