Not unpredictably,
Nisekoi: decides to wrap things up with
“Best Girl” Kirisaki Chitoge. The story of the first half is simple:
she loses and then eventually finds her beloved red ribbon. But because
the ribbon carries so much sentimental power for her—due to its
connection to both her beloved mother and her beloved Raku—that the time
she’s separated from it and worried it could be in some dumpster
somewhere is a palpable yawning
chasm of near-
Mr. Despair-like despair. Even Marika is thrown off by how meek and out of sorts her rival is.

No one is more worried/concerned about Chitoge than Raku, however.
While her predicament makes it easier for him to see her feminine side
(though physically she’s still a beast) and he entertains the notion
that things might be better if she just
stayed like this, at
the end of the day he’s a fan of the status quo, which means a
cheerful—if sometimes unreasonable and violent—Chitoge.
So he buys a new ribbon for her. She immediately sniffs it out as a
brand-new impostor, but because she’s so distraught, her guard is down
and she expresses genuine gratitude for Raku’s kindness.

Then Raku spots the
real ribbon atop an electric pole, and
the super-athletic Chitoge springs into gear…only to watch in horror as
her ribbon catches on the train cable and gets shredded by a train. But
at some point in her pursuit, she stopped following the real one and
pursued the fake, which is the one that got destroyed. Raku produces the
real one, unharmed…or
is it?
When she puts it back on she returns mostly to her normal best self,
but when she’s back home, we see she’s painstakingly repairing the
destroyed ribbon Raku said was the fake new one, but there’s a chance
the messed-up one
was the real one, and Raku again switched
them up to make her feel better. But at this point, she’s happy she has
two ribbons, both of which her love Raku gave her at different times in
her life.

The second part is one of the best kinds of
Nisekoi
segments: those spent primarily in Chitoge’s head as she struggles with
precisely what kind of feelings she has for Raku and if, when, and how
to express them to him. It’s clear her
heart wants her to
confess, but her head overanalyzes and sweats over every detail and
eventuality and potential effect of her words or actions, all coalescing
into a paralyzing effect; no matter what goes on in her head, Raku
can’t see or hear anything but the slightest hints; all to easily
misinterpreted or simply not noticed.

Chitoge seeks advice from her dad, who tells her the outrageous tale
of how he met Hana. Back then she was a student juggling 17 jobs to pay
her tuition, one of which was pizza delivery girl. She delivered a pizza
while Chitoge’s future dad was it the middle of a shootout with a rival
organization (well,
he wasn’t doing the shooting, but
directing from a pool lounger). Seeing Hana so confidently stride into
the middle of a warzone…it was love at first sight for pops.
But he goes on to say that
wasn’t the case for Hana: he had
to suffer multiple embarrassments, rejections, and yes, broken bones
before Hana finally fell for him. Chitoge may be right that her parents’
tale of coming together is atypical, but she’s wrong that it doesn’t
resemble her own romance with Raku in some fashion. The difference is,
Raku still keeps their relationship at an arm’s length due to it’s
official “fakeness.”

But he still gets clobbered by Chitoge regularly, and as we saw from
the last segment, when she suddenly stops being herself, he not only
notices, but worries about her and wants to help. Turns out, the
chemistry between her and Raku is so good, the question of how or when
to confess to him is more or less resolved by Raku himself.
In talking about how they’ve been fake lovers for more than a year
now, reminds Chitoge what she really wants, which is to spend more time
with him. And as long as she can do that, there’s no rush to say the
words…which is good, because she can barely say them to her stuffed
Chitoge gorilla.
The way this episode ended didn’t
promise a third season of
Nisekoi,
but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised. But would I watch it? While
hardly any show beats around the bush as stylishly and confidently as
Nisekoi,
the lack of deal-closing was just as frustrating this season as it was
in the first, and the show show no signs of fixing that.
Fortunately, it rarely has to, as its episodic nature lets us focus
on and revel in the colorful variety of love interests Raku has to
choose from, which makes us forget for just long enough that he’ll never
choose any of them.