7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life

Episode 5

Sometimes it's all about how you say something rather than what you're saying. Rishe's comment to Kaine Tully about how she used a “certain method” to learn about his sister's illness and the cure for it is a masterful understatement and workaround for how her “certain method” was actually “died six times and lived out the same time period doing different things,” and her responses to Theodore are similarly veiling the reason why she's well aware that Arnold isn't squeaky clean. But it's also worth noting that Elsie's body language does a very good job of masking what's really going on in her head and heart when Rishe is talking about why she's invested in Kaine using slum workers to produce her nail polish. When we see her tear up, the immediate thought is that she's touched that Rishe is taking her family circumstances to heart, but as the final moments of the episode reveal, that may not be all that's going on.

Elsie's body language and words are probably one of the best-done aspects of this episode. Everything can be read one way before the revelation that she and Kamil have conspired with Theodore to kidnap Rishe and another way with hindsight. What looks like self-effacing discomfort with an employer's generosity quickly turns into a guilty conscience in retrospect—she's not trying to refuse the gift because she's uncomfortable with Rishe being nice to her; she's refusing because she knows that she's going to betray her. The same goes for the tears when Rishe is making her case to Kaine; Elsie is trying to reconcile the fact that this woman who genuinely cares about the well-being of others is one she's not planning to do the same for. It would be even worse for her if Theodore was somehow blackmailing Elsie with her family's wellbeing—and honestly, I don't think we can rule that out, because Elsie doesn't seem to be that good an actress, and Theodore seems like the kind of creep who would do that.

He's in over his head with Rishe, though. Her calm acceptance of his words about her fiancé is an amazing way for her to turn the tables on him because it's the one thing he'd never expect, and the same is true for his statement that if she sticks around, Arnold might kill her, too. Sorry, Teddy, but Arnold already has killed her before, both directly and indirectly, and even if he does it this time too, she has no reason to believe that she won't just start the whole cycle over again. If you want to disarm Rishe, you're going to have to try harder than that.

What throws Theodore is also what seems to appeal to Arnold himself, even if he isn't fully aware of it. He saw and heard the whole exchange between his brother and his fiancée, and he knows that Rishe isn't afraid of him. Given how everyone else acts in his presence, there's something healing about her total acceptance of him; she even sets boundaries with him in a way that no one else seems to have done. Arnold keeps breaking that boundary, which involves no skin-to-skin contact, but Rishe doesn't appear to want to take him to task for the impulsive kiss, possibly because she's also learning new things about herself and her feelings about Arnold. Being with the man she believes is the direct cause of her looping through time may be helping her to see things differently and to realize that Arnold may be a scary man capable of killing, but that's not all that he is. It will take a lot of learning for both of them if they're going to truly break the cycle, but Arnold is beginning to realize that he wants that, too, even if he's unaware that the cycle is happening at all.

Maybe to both save herself and the world, Rishe first needs to help Arnold save himself.

Rating:

7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.