Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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“The light of drifting stars fills the sky.”

The fact is, it’s actually pretty easy to review something bad. Reviewing something that’s mediocre isn’t that hard either; line up its strengths and weaknesses, weigh them and determine if, at least for you, the former outweigh the latter. The real challenge is writing about something great.

And that is part of why this particular Healer Girl recap comes to you a day (possibly multiple days) late. That and a combination of truly fearsome writer’s block. If this column seems a bit less coherent than usual, I do apologize. It’s not in my general nature to “break the fourth wall” during these columns, but sometimes explanations are in order.

In any case, the actual plot of this episode is so simple that it almost doesn’t bear summarizing. Our main trio visit Hibiki’s family in the countryside. There, we learn a bit about her and her family, and a bit about Kana as well. One of Hibiki’s many younger brothers develops a precocious crush on Reimi, which is cute.

We also get an elaboration on the event that made Kana want to become a healer in the first place. When she was young, she had an asthma attack on a plane, and without an inhaler on hand, was in serious trouble. A mysterious healer, who she has been looking for since then, soothed her, thus setting her on the path to becoming a healer.

We find out almost immediately that this mysterious healer is, in fact, the girls’ teacher, Ria, who has just apparently not heard this story before. There’re a few details that don’t entirely line up about this, and I’m not sure if that’s the show trying to deliberately evoke the faulty memory of young children or if they’ll come back to that later. Either way, the reveal is humorously anticlimactic.

After all that, the episode’s real point makes itself known. It’s always been fascinating to me that so much human art is dedicated to depicting the natural world. By all rights, it’s something almost all of us are at least passingly familiar with; it’s the world out our window, or at most, a drive away. Why is it then that we spend so much time writing about waterfalls, so to speak? Why are we so fascinated with the motion of water and the little skipping and wriggling things that live in it? The girls swim in a small river, and I am reminded of my own times doing the same, visiting my father’s parents in the Pocono Mountains. These were not the happiest times for me, but they were simple, maybe that is why a tug that is something like nostalgia pulls at my heartstrings even so.

After the river scene, the girls trek toward a split-apart stone monument that reaches into the sky like the hand of a lost god. By the time they arrive, singing all the while, day’s become night.

The episode’s visual and emotional crux is a pair of landscape shots; the Milky Way rising into the sky like a plume of neon smoke. Later, the constellations that the fireflies within a cave play out on its ceiling and hovering in its air serve as a reprise. They are sights simultaneously familiar and obscure to me; even in my years living in rural Pennsylvania, there was simply too much light pollution for me to ever see that many stars. The night has always been black for me. Not so for Healer Girl, whose devotion to the natural world ranks up there with among the all-time best of its medium; Ghibli films, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Kamichu!

But the sky’s vastness and beauty shouldn’t obfuscate something else important. The Night on the Galactic Railroad namecheck, brought up explicitly in conversation, is what gives this episode its title. And it is casual, but not careless. Galactic Railroad, one of the seminal works of modern Japanese literature—which was, in 1985, transmuted into one of the most stunningly beautiful films ever made—is ultimately a story about death. Recall that only a week ago we saw a man nearly die on the operating table. This week Kana relays her own brush with ill health. Are these allusions a gesture toward the flip side of the show’s very premise—those whom medicine, no matter how fantastical, cannot save—or something else? Or “just” a reminder of the circle of being? All that begins ends, and dust begets dust, and the big wheel keeps on turning?

All this from a pseudo-beach episode that is also very much about how pleasant a trip to the countryside can be may seem like a stretch, but Healer Girl can juggle all these thoughts and emotions effortlessly. Healer Girl feels a lot like Kana herself, able to pull others into its own little world with a prodigal effortlessness. (Another thing we learn this episode, but one which is only dwelt on briefly.)

For precisely these reasons, it is one of the best things airing right now. Nothing else right now makes me feel this strongly or feel this much. I am happy that it exists.

Song Count: Just one for this episode, as the girls and Hibiki’s family are hiking up the mountain.

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