Episode 8

And here we have Satelite's very first Chu-related big lipped alligator episode! Here, Karin trips through time and a bizarre alternate dimension alongside a bunny-boy while dressed as Alice in Wonderland, we see a bunch of disembodied Suzuka flashbacks, and shit is generally trippy. Also, it's autumn in the past.

... I don't even know where to start with this. This is even weirder than I remembered.

Notes

• Not that it matters, again, but the title screen is delayed, again, this time for a cold opening (does it count as that if it's after the credits?) of Suzune running through the Labyrinth.

• • We get multiple shots of sand running through the hourglass. It seems like the clocktower striking midnight speeds it up (though that maybe lazy animation at work...)
  • The clocktower's hands are almost at midnight when it appears... but it makes its "bong" sound at that point anyway. When it strikes midnight it of course chimes properly, and for some reason at that point it starts moving towards Suzune. The City decays.

• We get an establishing shot of the clock in Karin's room, mostly to show that time has turned back later on. (Time is about 1:14. The times shown on the various clocks at various points don't really seem to matter.)
• Clocktower shows up, with a different time on it (about 2:55), after Karin's done ransacking her room. The face reflects a flashback of Kazuto in the lab, giving baby Suzuka/Karin the Athena ring (her face is shown, his isn't). The shot then transitions to the Labyrinth, where Suzune runs out into what's presumably the present.
• Karin finds a photo album! While noone's looking, Suzune runs by in the background of one that shows Karin in front of what seems to be a flowerbed clock.
• Nice shirt, Kazune-saurus... Oh, and Karin's hung on to the eel bread from episode 04. Eew.
• At the fountain, we see a flashback to Kazuto and Suzuka's wedding (it's never indicated whether Karin saw it or not). Kazuto gives Suzuka a wedding ring that looks suspiciously like some sort of kamika ring. This is the only time we see this scene or this ring.

• ... The fake rings actually look somewhere between Kazune's ring and the wedding ring, rather than just like Kazune's ring. Is this supposed to mean anything? They're totally cheap fakes and break by the time the scene's over, but...
• Then the clocktower shows up again, making its usual noise, but still apparently invisible to everyone present. Suzune runs by right behind Karin, unnoticed as well.
• Karin stops to take note of a cruddy old frog statue and an old building undergoing demolition... and encounters Suzune. She notes he looks like young Kazune from the photos. Suzune calls Karin 'mama', but seems to accept Karin's denial that she's his mother right away, unlike in Chu. Time on the CClock is either 2:55 or 11:15.
• "I have to find her soon, or..."? Logically, the time travel thing means he doesn't have to hurry, so he could be refering to the whole lost-in-time thing, if that's caused by a time limit. Or San Dimas Time is in effect (are there other time travel events where it seems to be a factor?), or Suzune doesn't know how time travel works because he's a little kid.

• ... And then Karin goes running after the clock-carrying rabbit who says he's going to be late and finds herself staring at another world. The Labyrinth, framed by two streetlamps, is already in its damaged form. The clocktower appears behind her (time: ~11:50)
• After the eyecatch, the sky behind the Clocktower fades to the Labyrinth, and then the city around Karin follows suit. Karin seems relatively unperturbed by it, more concerned about asking Suzune about the ring he dropped earlier. There's a constant clock-ticking sound in the background...
• A significant-looking piece of red cloth flutters where it's trapped on a piece of debris. What is apparently the same one is later seen in episode 11. Inside one of the houses, the photos of Karin, Kazune and Himeka from the albums decorate the wall around a windowframe. A shadow watches them from that window... does someone freaking live here? The shadow seems to retreat slowly behind the windowframe as the shot pans over it...
• Eventually, Karin and Suzune walk down a street and pass back into normal reality... well, time is frozen for at least a moment, but other than that, normal. The trees are all brightly colored in reds and oranges- it's autumn. There's a statue that seems to be a mother leading her son by a hand, which Karin and Suzune pause in front of. I'm sure it means something.
• Karin notices the froggy statue is now new, and the construction/demolition site is gone. MEANWHILE, IN A CLOCK SHOP NEARBY, SOMEONE IS HAVING AN ACID TRIP. What appears to be the same clock shop is seen in episode 16. Times on the clocks are all different, seemingly random. One of the clock faces says "reactor" in english, possibly a brand name? It may be a misspelled/engrished/distorted "regulator".
• And of course, we have little megane- um, Kirio and Kirika (face not shown) plus kindergarten Himeka and Kazune. The Clocktower is visible in the background (to far away to see the time). Karin decides to test whether it's Kazune or not with a mantis costume... inadvertently, as we find out, spooking kid Kazune into gaining that phobia in the first place. Also, she gets spooked by a spider in the process. Is this irony? Anyway, Karin concludes (incorrectly) that it isn't him because he doesn't react (he faints after she's left).
• Suzune realizes they've gone too far into the past and tries to take them back... as the Clock activates, Suzuka basically walks out of the Tower Bridge flashback (her face is shown in one shot but not the other, oddly) carrying a red umbrella like the one Karin had in ep 1. Her wings-and-olives hairtie is briefly visible.
  • This is the only time labyrinth time travel and white-tunnel time travel seem to overlap.
• ... Methinks Satelite took the phrase "frozen in time" a bit too literally. The ice on the Clocktower reflects scenes from the episode. The City is in even worse disrepair than before, in addition to the coating of ice, and everything is blue and gloomy. The sand in the hourglass runs out, and Suzune says he's 'lost in time'.
• Suzune needs to go through that door, but the seed of chaos is blocking it. The ice is even on the Seed; Karin breaks some of it off while trying to tear the Seed off with her bare hands.
• Karin ends up transforming with the Aphrodite ring to attempt to fight the seed. And in a similar sequence to her first transformation with her usual ring, her powers run wild. "Mom said there was a meaning behind the power", says Suzune; "If you don't know the meaning, you can't release the true power."
  • Suzune kept his Clock when Karin transformed, and Karin's Clock seems to have the hourglass on it in at least one shot (not sure if art error or what).
• And then future Jin (who made a cameo in the previous episode) and Micchi (who isn't even properly introduced until next episode) come and save Karin and Suzune. Their faces aren't shown.
• And then Karin wakes up(?) where she was at the start of the episode. She experiences a bit of deja vu and seems to remember the events of the episode (recalling what Suzune said to he about the ring's power), but wonders if it was a dream...

Speculah and Analysis

Of course, the simplest option is that Satelite just didn't think out how this episode worked and how events fit into the larger picture, but that's the boring answer, so forget that!

... Where do I even start.

Timeline

This episode touches multiple different points in the timeline:

• The past: where Karin and Suzune mistakenly end up, with kid versions of most of the main cast conveniently nearby.
• The future-past: when Suzune is probably from- after the events of the main series but before the opening and ending Chu scenes.
• The future: when Jin and Micchi are from. Likely the same future as the opening and ending scenes.
  • It's unknown how they can time travel- do the Noble God rings come with their own clocks like Aphrodite's apparently does now, or is their Suzune just off-screen somewhere?

A stable time loop is set up here- Karin tries to scare Kazune with the mantis costume and ends up causing his fear of bugs.

• Incidentally, this contradicts the manga's explanation for his fear, which was much saner and explained in an untranslated bonus chapter- I don't know all the details, but apparently he fell into pit full of bugs when trying to save Himeka from them. (I'm not sure if the anime writers would have known about this or not; if I remember correctly it was one of the "plus" chapters that was published to promote the anime, so depending on when Koge wrote them they might have only come up after this episode entered production.)

The anime series takes place over spring and summer, and the scene in the past Karin visits seems to take place in fall judging by the trees. Perhaps the frozen-over Labyrinth is meant to represent winter. The dead trees and leaves in the opening scene imply winter as well.

Differences between this and episode 9

There's actually an entire day's worth of events- Karin looking for her ring, Kirio selling the fake rings, etc- that apparently no longer happens/ed after time reverses at the end of the episode. Not to mention that whole thing where Micchi transfers in on this day in the next episode... The scene with the frozen Clocktower reflecting shots of the episode may reflect what happens to these events- they're put on ice, so to say. On the other hand, it may really have been (partially or entirely) only a dream- the weird nature of some events happening even in 'reality' (Suzune running through a photograph, for example, and the floating flashbacks) makes the whole thing feel dreamlike. Or maybe time travel just has those effects in this series?

• This may explain the clock shop acid trip scene- in dreams, things like text and clock faces will become distorted as your brain tries to construct images of them without any information on what they'd be saying. The Clocktower and Chronos Clock are clear because they're special entities that actually "exist" within the dream, carrying actual information with them that can be actually read.
  • The clock shop in question is seen in episode 16 in normal reality, so it does actually exist. We don't know if Karin knew about it before or not (and have no reason to know).
• The same "pocket alternate dream timeline" effect is seen in epsiode 22, where the moon phases change within the episode in a seemingly deliberate way, weird shit happens, and both Karin and Kazune think what happened was a dream.

Kazune mentioning the giant mantis (actually Karin in costume) points towards Karin's effects on the past actually happening, at least.

The blocked door

The door Suzune wants to go through when they get lost in time.

Despite it being apparently in the same area as the opening scene (the same hydrant and streetlight from before are shown), the door doesn't appear until time "freezes". This could also just be a result of lazy art asset reuse, though.

It seems like the door was Suzune's destination all along, but he needed his "mama" to get through the seed, hence him running all over time trying to find her. I'm going to guess it would have led to the point in Chu when he first shows up, allowing Karin to recieve the Aphrodite ring for real and for Chu to begin.

• This theory goes well with Rika kicking Karin out of the future in the beginning- she could have planted the seed there to prevent Karin from ever gaining the power to oppose her. However, past Karin and future Micchi and Jin were apparently able to get Suzune through the door, foiling her plan.

On the other hand, the fact that it doesn't appear until the two are "lost in time" makes it feel like some sort of emergency exit type deal. It depends on what the consequences of being lost in time are- if it prevents you from leaving the Labyrinth through other ways (eg you can't use the Chronos Clock anymore because it's run out of steam), it would serve the purpose of being the only way out. I have no idea where it would lead in this case.

etc

If the wedding ring isn't just a normal ring, what is it? The stone is blue, implying it's Kazune's, or maybe Kazuto's if that even means anything, and the style is more similar to the anime's Chu ring set than the present ones. On the other hand, giving her a ring she knows was made in a lab for increasingly questionable purposes seems kinda... lame.

There's also the knockoff rings, which look halfway between Kazune's ring and the wedding ring.

• I'm guessing they're supposed to look like Kazune's ring, and the differences from that ring are either to make them more clearly knockoffs or just off-model art; similarities to Suzuka's wedding ring would be a coincidence.

The scene where Suzune runs out of the labyrinth and into normal time shows a street in the labyrinth lined up perfectly with a street in the "real" world. Also, the scene where Karin enters the Labyrinth shows a crumbling wall to the right where there was a storefront, though the former curves while the latter is straight. This implies the layout of the labyrinth follows the buildings and such of the real world to at least some degree.

Do Karin's Aphrodite powers and the whole Noble God setup work differently in the anime? She never had this sort of raw power in the Chu manga. Ep 1 had her hanging back while the boys attacked the Seed together (something that never happened in the manga in the first place), with Karin stepping in after they couldn't cut it, implying the three are passable together but Karin plus a boy is even stronger... I get the vague feeling the boys might act like some sort of limiter on her powers, if she has to understand the 'meaning' (probably love) to control and use them.

So who's that shadow in the window?

• Option one: Jin or Micchi (more likely Micchi since it looks kinda tall), keeping an eye on Karin but not wanting to interfere just yet. Thus they only actually show up once Karin is pretty much unconcious, and she wouldn't be able to recognise them. This means the photos are there for some other reason, perhaps just an effect of the Labyrinth reflecting the past/memories or something.
• Option two: Adult Karin, who lives here. Either the Labyrinth is habitable (where do you get food? or do you even need to eat?) and she's moved here from the bad future for whatever reason, or the Labyrinth is the bad future once Kirihiko's done with it.
  • This means Kazune would travel to the Labyrinth (probably following Suzune), not the future, in the Christmas/New Years chapters of Chu, though if this isn't the case he'd probably still have to go through the Labyrinth anyway.

Oh, and Karin probably still has that eel bread corpse under her bed. Assuming it was really there in the first place. Just saying.

Additional notes

This episode was very loosely based on a bonus chapter included in volume three of the original manga. It has Karin in an Alice dress like the one in this episode randomly going back in time after being bonked on the head by a camera, and was likely never meant to be canon, just a cute bonus thing.

It's possible Chu itself was slightly inspired by that chapter, as Suzune wears a very similar outfit to the one Kazune wears there (in the anime he's wearing a school uniform, likely to avoid confusion since Suzune's actually there).