After Chihaya confronted her past and recovered from it rather quickly, she performs a special song to turn a new page on her career. Amidst this, Kuroi attempts a last-ditch sabotage to 765 Productions again. Sadly, it doesn’t quite work out and results in the unexpected…
Thankfully, everything went well after Chihaya made a comeback in the last episode with her emotional performance. Once everything got cleared up with an “exclusive” interview requested by the Producer, Kuroi is clearly running out of fuel to screw the girls over. Not only that, I like how Jupiter finally realizes that he is playing unfairly and tells it him to his face amidst the decision to quit after witnessing what he had the audio engineers do to make the girls look bad. However, that plan gets quickly foiled when Chihaya’s singing awed the sound engineers so much that they had to restore the accompaniment instantly. So pretty much Kuroi’s trickery was utterly pointless, especially now he lost Jupiter forever, thus leaving 961 Productions with a tarnished reputation. Because of this, I can’t really hate Jupiter anymore as they finally redeemed themselves by apologizing to the Producer and that they aren’t involved in the troubles Kuroi caused (except for Episode 16).
Meanwhile, the girls become anxious since the accompaniment music is now assumed forever ruined. Through the help of Haruka, she convinces Chihaya to reveal her plan of coming on stage and sing in a solo performance as a cappella. I liked how she was able to gather support from everyone and pulled it off rather beautifully. In her partially music-less performance of “Sleeping Princess” (眠り姫), it simply shows how amazing Imai Asami’s singing truly is. Of course, the transition with the music coming back gave it an effect that was so powerful that it blew everyone away.
On the lighter note, we finally get to see Kotori sing at a restaurant when the girls get invited for their hard work. Despite her fame being only five minutes long, she looked gorgeous while singing, “Flower” (花) along with the ending featuring her other song, Sky (空). It was simply the cherry on top of the strawberry sundae on a really underrated, but excellent episode. Not only that, Chihaya finally smiles in the opening, which indicates that the suffering is finally over for good.
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