Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime, and provide thoughts and analysis on each episode. You should expect spoilers for both the current episode and all episodes before it.

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Serious question; did people think that takt op.Destiny needed to like, explain itself?

Surely some people must have. That’s the only explanation I can really muster for the puzzling note on which the second episode, “Music -Reincarnation-” opens. We open not by picking up after last week’s riotous romp, but at some point before then. A sort of “how we got here.” takt op here runs through its world’s and protagonist’s backstories competently, but without much flash. We see that Takt lost his father. We see him struggle and, frankly, fail, to cope by holing up in his room for an unknowable amount of summers, pounding away at his piano but interacting with no one but Cosette and Anna. (The former of whom acts notably differently here than she does in the first episode, but we’ll get to that.) He gets snippy with them and balks at the suggestion that anything is wrong. Typical traumatized teenager stuff, mostly.

None of this is bad, but it’s a far cry from the knock-you-on-your-ass bombast of the opening episode. Certainly I don’t know how those who liked takt op.Destiny’s more lighthearted side are going to react. And while it’s certainly tolerable, it would be a pretty disappointing note for the show to continue on if it weren’t leading up to something. Thankfully, it is.

You see, it turns out that a traveling, Symphonica-sponsored music festival will be arriving in town. Surely, nothing bad could come of this.

For a while, nothing does. Grand Maestro Sagan (the one responsible for the “music ban” in the first place) makes a brief but notable appearance. Other than that, the festival sequence is fairly lighthearted and warm. Takt and Cosette even play piano together at one point. It’s cute.

^{Oh you cishets and your instruments.}

Of course, this is not the sort of show where things stay copacetic for very long. Soon, a band of D2s are attracted to the festival and everything goes to hell. Cosette nearly dies, Takt loses an arm. If that doesn’t seem to immediately square with what we’ve known of the series so far, you’ll want to hold on to your monocles, because the final few minutes are where “Music -Reincarnation-” really earns its stripes. (And, yes, explains its title.)

We don’t get the specifics–and why would we need them?–but Takt unintentionally does some kind of music-magic that infuses Cosette with new life and seemingly transforms her into a Musicart. We end on a cliffhanger, but not before some truly stunning, wonderfully melodramatic dialogue and imagery.

The remainder of this past-set story to be resolved sometime next week, we must assume.

In general, it’s kind of an odd follow-up to the first episode. Mostly for how tonally different it is, and for the implication that the Cosette we got to know last week is not “really” her. (I suspect, even though it doesn’t come up explicitly here, that being infused with a Musicart somehow changes one’s personality. Recall that Cosette was almost android-y at times last week.) But if takt op.Destiny wants to trade in some of its visual oomph for melodrama, I think it turns out to be well-earned here. I just hope the series doesn’t forget why people tuned in in the first place.

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