Recap: Shinobu figures out how to return to the present, but Araragi finds the date they arrived too convenient to be a coincidence. He tries to help by changing the future, but altering time is never, ever a good idea.

Jel’s Thoughts: As I mentioned last week I’m thoroughly tired of time travel, and Monogatari did nothing this episode that we haven’t seen in dozens of other like minded stories. All we got was another opportunity of Araragi to up his creep factor and harass the little girl version of Hanekawa. I always hated the closet pervert side of Araragi as it doesn’t make any sense with his character, but it’s way too late in the game to be complaining about that. Perhaps more frustrating is Araragi seems to have watched enough movies and read enough manga to understand messin’ with time never works. I suppose he is naive (or stupid) enough to ignore that and try anyway, but I couldn’t help and roll my eyes a little.

Fortunately it seems time travel is only a small plot device in this instance and not the crux of the story. Shinobu rather quickly figures out more than one way to return home, so I was glad to see that taken away as the focus. In fact I’ve found it rather amusing how casually she’s taken the whole situation, as if leaping back and forth through time was as simple as figuring out how to set an alarm clock or something. It was also good to give us a friendly reminder of how dangerous she is, something we would appreciate more if Shaft ever got around to making that Kizumonogatari movie. Come on guys, get on that!

Ultimately it appears this whole thing was just a set up for our vampire duo to accidentally bring on the apocalypse, which is quite funny considering how they got in this situation in the first place. Considering the title of this arc is “Mayoi Jiangshi“, you can probably take some guesses as to what kind of end the world has met at their hands. After several episodes of watching Hanekawa’s mostly internal struggle I am pretty excited at the prospects for a battle on a grander scale, so I’m glad to see us heading in that direction.