Weekly Watch: Scum’s Wish – Episode 7

Over the course of its run, Scum’s Wish has been practically perfect in every single area since the beginning and has been a consistently entertaining and thought provoking watch that I look forward to every week.

However, just as I expected, the time has finally come where the show has taken a slight dip in quality with an episode that was by no means bad, but was certainly a step down from the previously established narrative.

At the end of last week we had Moca asking to on a date with Mugi, a date which he then accepted, the majority of this episode focused primarily on that date and Moca’s complex feelings towards Mugi.

So Moca and Mugi go on their date, and throughout the entire thing it’s painfully clear what Moca’s intentions are. She’s always been living in a fantasy world where she is a princess and Mugi is her prince charming, and she wants to keep this fantasy going for just one more night where she can have him all to herself, basking him in her positive spotlight before finally letting him go and moving on with her life.

But not only does this attitude of Moca’s cause some awkwardness between the two throughout the entire date, it also doesn’t work at all, because when all is said and done, Moca realises that she’s come to want the real Mugi, not the prince that she’d dreamt up for all the years. And with a kiss between the two, Moca’s idealistic fantasy is shattered and she becomes aware of what she really wants. She can’t kept living in her world of prince and princess any more. She’s not a cute little kid any more, she’s a woman and she has genuine feelings for Mugi.

We then get a scene between the two in Mugi’s room where the two of them start to get intimate, and Moca shows a willingness to give Mugi everything, even if he doesn’t love her back. For the first time ever, she drops the cute facade and gets serious, ready to give in to her own sexual desires that up until this point, I wasn’t even sure were something she’d thought about. It’s an incredibly depressing scene, and it ends with Mugi not taking advantage of the situation, stating that he doesn’t want to be unfaithful to Hanabi, which hurts Moca, but she understands and leaves it at that.

Speaking of Hanabi, our main heroine is practically absent this week getting a short scene with herself and the guy she was trying to seduce last episode and another scene at the end. She begins to realise how futile her efforts to win over a guy who isn’t interested in love and shows a heavy amount of anxiety brewing up inside of her as a result.

Aside from that, not much else happened this week. It was a rather slow episode that focused heavily on Moca’s some what complex feelings towards Mugi, the awakening of her sexual desires and the crumbling of her fantasy world. Unfortunately, while it was interesting to see the focus shift away from Hanabi this week, the exploration of Moca’s character just wasn’t as engaging as what the series has previously shown, to the point that Hanabi’s little scenes in this episode managed to outshine it completely.

This was by no means a bad episode, in fact, it was brilliant and beyond the level of quality most shows ever achieve in their full runtime. But I expected a little more than what we got, and the tiniest of cracks have shown as a result, if only for a brief moment.

That being said, the episodes final scene indicates that we’ll finally be getting back to some top quality development for the relationship between Hanabi and Mugi, with the both of them agreeing to confess their feelings to their forbidden loves before moving on and starting a real relationship with one another. It seems we’ll be in for a very interesting ride in the coming weeks and I’m hyped to see what comes next.

Despite my complaints, this episode was still excellent and Scum’s Wish definitely still looks like it could honestly be Top 10 material for my favourites. I’m looking forward to finding out if that will be the case.