Recap / Meta Runner S 2 E 04 Transfer Student

♫ Come with me, we'll fill our heads with these memories... ♫

Tari attempts to track down MD-5 and goes into a game where... she has to date people?!?

After Belle sneaks her a smartphone, Tari warps into the online anime dating sim Pocket Gakusei in an attempt to find a way to contact Lamar and the rest of MD-5...which proves to be much harder than she anticipated. Meanwhile, Belle returns to the site of the Project Blue incident in search of answers, with the help of an unlikely ally...

Episode 14 provides examples of:

• As Herself: Kizuna AI appears as the in-game guide for Pocket Gakusei.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Theo doesn't remember Belle until she brought up throwing a coconut at her in the streaming lab.
• Call-Back: To “No Clip” when Belle first talks to Theo:
  Belle: Yo kid? Can you hear me?
  Theo: Huh? God?
  Belle: Close... but no.
  • When Tari is "thinking like Lamar", she recalls an exchange from "Game Plan" where he calls his Satsuki-chan body pillow his "sidechick", which leads Tari to have Kizuna summon her, believing that she can get her to Lamar.
• Cliffhanger: Tari ends up learning the hard way that she needs to date Satsuki-chan in order to have any hopes of contacting Lamar, and while Belle manages to get away with the file on Lucinia, she ends up having to abandon Theo to avoid being discovered by a TAS Corp guard. Theo is once again captured, and Lucks decides to place him within a corrupted version of Ultra Jump Mania, where Theo ends stuck to the floor and without his coconut as he’s approached by glitching-out enemies.
• Continuity Cavalcade: When Belle is trying to get Theo to remember who she is:
  Belle: Come on, kid! We literally talked yesterday! I hunted your friends through Tempest... We had a car chase through Silica City! You threw a coconut at my head in the streaming lab!
• Covers Always Lie: While the thumbnail and description for the episode focus on Tari in Pocket Gakusei, the majority of the episode focuses on Belle and Theo joining forces to look for files on Project Blue in the TAS Corp servers, with Tari's scenes taking up only about 4 minutes before they abruptly end, not to be continued until the next episode. And despite appearing on the in the thumbnail with Tari, Satsuki-chan doesn't appear until towards the end of Tari's last scene in the episode, when Tari finds out she has to date her in order to get to Lamar.
• Creative Closing Credits: Instead of the usual closing credits and end card, we get a credits roll with images of Tari and Satsuki-chan (intercut with brief flashes of images of Theo in peril within the corrupted Ultra Jump Mania cartridge), set to Pocket Gakusei's ending theme.
• Good Bad Bugs: Belle makes use of this with Theo, by using these to break Theo out of his cell, and then later to fight back against the quarantine-bots while waiting for the file on Lucinia to be uploaded.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: Pretty much the entirety of the corrupted Ultra Jump Mania.
• Shout-Out: Among the items in Lucks' private servers includes files on "Spletzer Records" and plans for something called a "W.A.H. launcher".