“Their Youth Part 2”
What They Say:
“Clank, clank, clank, clank…” Today, the railroad crossing bar goes down again, stopping someone on their way somewhere. The various stories of youth, eros, art, first love, etc that occur during the time spent waiting at a railroad crossing… All railroad crossings, all the time. Bringing you a variety of short stories about railroad crossings!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The series draws to a close with another second part to a previous story, which works nicely from my point of view. This one takes us back to the first episode pairing where we got the moment where a girl has her best friend reveal her interest in her, which makes waiting all the more frustrating and exciting at the crossing stop. Everything is flying through her mind while her friend keeps her face in her book but when the silence is broken it just reveals confusion on both their parts because they haven’t really talked about anything since the confession. It gets hilariously dark for a moment but there’s a simple aspect to all of this just in how difficult it is for teenagers and a lot of adults to actually talk about things like this. So seeing Tomo embrace it after being called out on it is just a wonderful moment.
In Summary:
Bringing that first potential relationship to the next step here after showing some of the difficulties they’ve had since the confession is a nice way to circle back around with everything. It really does leave me wanting more of the series itself but for some of these short stories to be expanded upon a lot and really explored since several were very much non-conventional stories and pairings. With this finale, Crossing Time is one of the few short-form series that I’m really going to miss because it did things different and took more chances, making for some engaging viewing in just a couple of minutes each week and sometimes saying more than a lot of other shows with a full-length episode to do it.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll