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

---

This week, Healer Girl goes Halloween. Yes, it’s time for the fall festival at the clinic, and must of this episode’s real estate is taken up by charming slice-of-life scenes. The girls planning a Halloween event for the clinic, shopping for treats to give away, etc. But it’s also an episode about Hibiki, the first to center on the white-haired healer since episode five.

^{We also get the very important sight of Baby Hibiki.}

This episode paints her as someone plagued with chronic self-doubt, something that’s been broadly alluded to a handful of times but hasn’t really been explored until now. The episode is fairly nonlinear; we cut back and forth several times to Hibiki’s childhood as well as her first day leaving for Tokyo to study to be a Healer. The episode also dives into her own bad habit of comparing herself to Ria, whom she often feels as though she falls short in comparison to.

The Halloween party itself ends up being a huge hit, of course, but there’s a notable bit where Ria seemingly has to intervene because the song the girls are singing is just that powerful. It’s not spelled out explicitly, but it does seem to imply that the whole “image song” technique can potentially be deleterious somehow. That this is snuck into an otherwise pretty unassuming episode is fascinating and is another example of Healer Girl‘s clever repurposing of typical slice-of-life tropes. (Alternately; I’m reading too far into it and it’s just a nice episode in which not a ton of importance happens. That’s fine too.)

But! After the credits roll, we get an interesting little conversation between Ria and her assistant / probably-wife. It’s cryptic; full of mention that the girls need to learn proper “control,” and that “time is limited,” and that soon Ria’s own “time will come.” What any of this means is deliberately left opaque; we’re an outside party looking in for this conversation, and these are simply mysteries to be solved in the two weeks that remain of the show’s run.

Until then, anime fans.

Song Count: 3, making this one of Healer Girl‘s more musically dense episodes. I’m particularly fond of the third song.

---

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.