うる星やつら episode 46 (2002)
Urusei Yatsura 46 (2022) review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Lum and Rupa come to a secret agreement to have his space pigs eat all the dark mushrooms on Earth, regardless of the outcome of Lum’s challenge to Ataru. Meanwhile, Ataru starts his ten day marathon to grab Lum’s horns. Despite everyone begging him otherwise, he refuses to say he loves Lum. Elsewhere, Rupa and Karula reconcile and become an official couple.

Lum ups the stakes by saying she’ll erase his and everyone else’s memories of aliens if he doesn’t win. Ataru refuses to give into blackmail. As such, an enraged Lum returns to her father’s ship to arrange the memory loss machine. Oyuki and Benten follower her. Benten demands Lum not go through with this since Benten has come to like Earth. Unfortunately, she accidentally sets the device off in her anger.

Ten-chan gives Lum and Ataru’s friends special balls to try to hit the off switch on the flying memory device.  At the same time, Lum wonders why Ataru refuses to say he loves her. Ataru silently reasons that if he actually says it, she won’t know if he meant it or not. So he has to act rather than speak. On the 10th day, Ataru has all but lost. She demands to know if he’s really okay with forgetting her. Ataru claims he’d never forget her.

Ataru collapses from exhaustion, accidentally dropping Lum’s old horns. He grabs them back, but Lum realizes that despite everything, Ataru does care for her. To that end, she allows him to grab her horns, thus he wins and the memory machine shuts down. Sometime later, Lum and Ataru are up to their normal bickering hijinks. Lum vows she’ll make Ataru say he loves her. He says he’ll do it on his death bed.

Thoughts/Review:

Taken from source manga chapters 365 and 366 (and obviously originally adapted as the last Urusei Yatsura movie, The Final Chapter), Urusei Yatsura 46 brings the 2022 adaptation to a merciful end.

A Logical but Flawed Reason

As I have mentioned in other reviews, the frustrating aspect of a series like Urusei Yatsura is the demand to keep the status quo, no matter what. Thus in Urusei Yatsura 46, that dictate trumps all other considerations. Apparently, when the manga was written, Takahashi-sensei was determined not to have Ataru say “I love you” to Lum ’cause Ataru could never change or grow as a character. He had to remain static at all costs.

Still, at least the story had a logical reason for Ataru to not just say he loves Lum. In his mind, just saying it when the Earth is at stake (as far as he knew) and everyone’s memories would be wiped meant that she would never know if what he said was true or not. That does make sense. So why not tell Lum this?

And that’s where the flaw in all this is. Ataru is willing for Earth to be overrun with alien mushrooms, and to have everyone’s memories wiped of aliens rather than actually say he loves Lum. And he won’t even discuss his reason’s cause “plot”. It is a good thing the plot had Ataru collapse and drop Lum’s old horns so she’d know that actions speak louder than words. But it is all contrived due to the demands of the plot.

So Lum compromises, Ataru stays the same, and the status quo is secured in unchanging ice. And that is emphasized at the end with Lum angry with Ataru again and then electrocuting him for doing what he always does.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Let me wrap up my review of Urusei Yatsura 46 with some final thoughts.

• I really hate the cringe British colloquialisms the translator/adapter used for the dark dimension folk’s Tohoku accent. Yes, I get that there’s a different accent used in the Japanese audio. But the British have multiple accents of their own, not that I expect whomever wrote the subtitle script to actually know that. (They might.) But just like when translators use Southern or other accents to replace Japanese ones, they almost always come off as cringe.
• Speaking of the subtitles…well, you know. They were crap in general.
• The resolution of Karula and Lupa’s thread meant nothing ’cause I had nothing invested in these characters. And it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, based on the information we’ve been given for this last story arc.

End the end, Urusei Yatsura 46 brings an end to a series that sadly, I’d grown weary of. The episode gives some cameos to as many people as it could, and it does have a certain level of entertainment value. But I’ll save the rest of my thoughts for a series review.