Steins;Gate episode 21

I’ve been struggling to come up with a topic to talk about in this post. There’s not much more I can say on Okarin at this point, beyond the fact that he has finally reached the end of his tether and started attempting suicide to change events. I can’t really talk too much about Mayuri either, because she voices her thoughts out loud anyway. I know she’s meant to be a bit thick and her tiny brain can’t contain anything without spilling out, but having Okarin overhear her talk to a gravestone for 5 minutes was an incredibly lazy method of storytelling.

No, instead let’s talk about Kurisu.

Unlike Mayuri, Kurisu doesn’t voice every single issue and thought she has. That’s how you create a character that is unwilling to show her true feelings. You don’t suddenly remember mid-conversation that she’s a tsundere and toss in a blushing stuttered line. It didn’t hit me at the time when Okarin told her that she would die how calmly she took it. In fact, when it comes to facing things with a brave face, Kurisu has dealt with everything thrown at her far more calmly than Okarin has.

Mind you, it’s been Okarin who has been more proactive when issues appeared, albeit more often through blind rage and panic than calm thought. He was the one who leapt upon the Time Leap machine when Mayuri died in the first timeline. It’s often through this blind proactive-ness that they’ve gotten into this trouble in the first place though. It was his charging through the D-Mails that caused the timeline to shift the way it has. Kurisu hasn’t done anything to prevent the shifting timelines either though, so maybe she’s less blameless in this than I originally thought. You get the feeling that she’d still charge through with the D-Mails and Time Leaps even with the extra thought. If anything, she’d be more likely to keep her eye on the cold logical scientific side than Okarin’s human aim to stick to saving Mayuri. She did become the leader of CERN SERN, so we know she has the capability to be ruthless.

Okarin’s issue of which timeline to choose is solely a human issue on his part. Does he choose to save Mayuri or Kurisu (or, what it will more likely end up, some sort of compromise between the two)? Between Okarin’s human or Mad Scientist side, the human side will ultimately win over, so he won’t be able to choose between two humans he is friends with. Kurisu, on the other hand, could probably erase the human element from the equation and consider which timeline would be the better for humanity as a whole. Which is why I’m convinced she’ll choose to die.

In the current timeline, Mayuri dies, CERN SERN gets the time travel machine, and the world falls into that dystopian ruin. In the alternate world, Kurisu dies, CERN SERN never get the time travel machine and, presumably, the world doesn’t fall into ruin. The reason Kurisu dies I’m guessing is because Suzuha kills her when she travels back in time. She came back like a Terminator to eliminate a key component in what made CERN SERN take over the world. In this version of the timeline, CERN SERN never get their hands on the time travel machine, either through capturing Okarin and Kurisu after killing Mayuri or by having their science department ruin by Kurisu.

For the world not to become the dystopian future as told by Suzuha, they have to go to the timeline where Kurisu dies, and I’m pretty sure she knows that. She’s a smart girl. It’s also a fairly hard thing to come to terms with, sacrificing yourself for humanity and all that. No wonder she wanted some alone time to visit the place of her inevitable death. It’s not like they can test the theory a few times once they jump timelines, because Kurisu is the one who invented the Time Leap machine.

In short, Kurisu has to die.

…man, even I feel depressed writing that.