Oh Lord, you’re probably thinking.  This again.

I never had the problem with the Endless Eight arc that most people did.  I thought it was a pretty cool move to examine the fundamental experience of a SF classic, the time loop.  Did it get repetitive?  Of course.  Did I let some of the scenes run while I checked my e-mail?  Sure.  But the final moments of the final episode are as sweet and wonderful as anything, and are the reason I watch Haruhi to begin with.

Let me take you back — mind you, I didn’t watch them all when they came out, I ended up sitting on them for months — back to the arc itself.  Haruhi wants to do something before summer break is over, but can’t quite figure out what it is herself.  Kyon definitely can’t.  Time loops back on itself more than 15,000 times.  In the end Kyon guesses — sort of — and demands everyone come over to finish homework at his place.  It’s a traditional summer event Haruhi has never had.  It fixes the problem.

The ending of the arc has three particular “moments,” if you want to call them that, all tied together into one.  The first is the mental flood during the climax, when Kyon’s memories are mashed together into a kind of vision that’s very compelling for its oddity.  The second is when he proposes his plan, as everyone sees what he’s doing and Haruhi sounds fairly hurt that she wasn’t invited.  The third is when Kyon and Koizumi discuss the past loops and Kyon considers the “gifts” of deja vu that his past selves left for him.

He’s not too far off from what a lot of philosophers say.  Derrida, for instance, described the “present” simply as the point through which the “future” strains to become the “past.”  It’s a kind of focus or fulcrum, and any sense we make of the “present” exists more in the past than the present, because by the time we figure out X event, Y event is already here.  Memory, then, is a gift from the past.  Haruhi, in unconsciously meddling with the nature of the universe, accidentally robs the world of much of its philosophical underpinning, like the past-present-future connectivity derived from memory.  Remember, this is the show that posits time as independent planes we pass through, rather than an “analog” river that flows continuously.  And the show’s all about connections.

That beautiful feeling of personal connectivity that Kyon creates, both in himself and, less tangibly, between the SOS brigade, makes the end of Endless Eight a beautiful moment of its own.

Moment 5 (of twelve!): connections in time, connections in people.

Thus spake Cuchlann on Friday, 18 December 2009 at 8:24 pm, and Anime expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.