The second season of Higurashi has really become way more consistent than the first one. The first season frequently switched between awesome and annoying every few episodes, but right now, the series has been given a lot more time to build up. This has both negative and positive effects. The bad ones are:
– This isn’t the roller-coaster-ride that was the first season. The plot went nearly twice as fast as it’s going now.
– The twists have less impact. Because they’re so far apart, the different plot-twists and turns aren’t as frequent any more, and the focus on mystery has declined significantly in the second season. Yet again, I don’t see any reason to write a summary for this episode, since there were only a few events that developed the plot.
Because of this, though, the focus on the characters has increased dramatically, and there are almost no bad moments left. There may be less surprises, but instead of that this series now has the chance to continuously build up for its characters, without any annoying interruptions. This episode showed this yet again. Seeing an army of more than sixty people, all stretch out their hands towards the abused Satoko was awesome.
Regarding the new information: we get to know a bit more about Satoko’s disease. Interestingly enough, the symptoms Rika describe come surprisingly close to the disease that the others who went berserk have: she’ll feel as if everything is assailing her. In a panicked state, she won’t be able to reason anymore. Once she gets something in her head, this won’t change. This explains her behaviour in Arc 3 a bit more. Even after her uncle died, she still was in a panicked state at the time, so the shower-incident happened. Afterwards, she freaked out for real when she found out that Irie killed himself.
The question remains: is Satoko’s disease THE disease? Why is Satoko the only one who’s getting treatment, even though Keiichi, Shion and Rena have been shown to also go berserk? Could it actually be that either Rika or Satoko is the original source of the disease, and that the two of them have been spreading it unconsciously? If this was the case, it would explain the Hinamizawa-disaster: the Yamainu take Rika’s guts and use them to give every villager an overdose of the disease. The syringe also doesn’t instantly cure the disease; it just calms down the symptoms. It does make sense. After using the syringe, it would have been easier to reason with the different people.]]>
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni – 35
I think the decease that Satoko’s endured right now is actually the same that made the other character gone mad in the previous season. All the symptom and the effect was actually the same. So, basically the theoty about some decease the lurk inside the Hinamisawa was quite true and I think Satoko and Rika is the object for the experiment to creat the cure of the decease.
Hmm…that’s an interesting theory about the disaster. 🙂 It seems like that could be a possibility.
In this episode, I was mostly thinking about the timing of the uncle’s return, some time after Rena confronted her father about the woman he was seeing (who was conspiring with Satako’s uncle).
I’m fairly sure that the times in which we hadn’t seen Satako’s uncle, Rena had killed him before he got a chance to take Satako back.
As for the theory of Satako’s disease being THE disease, my guess is that the loss of her brother affected her far more deeply and is a much larger part of her life than the things which had triggered the disease in others. This would explain how the others were able to ‘get over it’ while Satako needed regular injections to not fall to it.