WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Fruits Basket: The Final Season Episode 7, "That's Right, It's Empty," now streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.
Episode 6 of Fruits Basket: The Final Season ended on one of the series' most shocking cliffhangers: Kyo Sohma having flashbacks to witnessing the death of Kyoko Honda. Episode 7, "That's Right, It's Empty," pushes Fruits Basket's dark turn even further. The episode continues to build anxiety around Kyo's story in its opening and ending scenes, while Akito's response to losing her bonds with the zodiac becomes similarly brutal.
Episode 7's opening scene starts off looking like another flashback, with a young Kyo chatting with Kyoko. It turns into a nightmare as the ghost of Kyo's mom tries to drag him into the cat's prison house and his guilt over Kyoko's death warps into visions of another bloody corpse: Tohru's. Answers to questions raised by this nightmare will have to wait another week. Kyo's story once again becomes fuel for a cliffhanger, with the cat finally ready to talk to Tohru right as the episode ends.
The majority of the episode actually focuses on Akito, using flashbacks to delve into her upbringing as the Sohmas' "god" while showing how she's completely losing it in the present. It's revealed that Ren raised Akito as a boy specifically for inheritance purposes and threatened to have an abortion after finding out her and Akira's child would be female. Episode 7 unveils more and more of their twisted family dynamics, wherein Ren and Akito both felt as if they were in competition for Akira's love and doting servants spoiled the young heir.
When Akira died, one of those servants gave Akito a box she said contained "Akira's soul." This is the box Ren tried to get Rin to steal from Akito. Now, Ren tries to take it herself, armed with a knife ready to attack her daughter if need be. All this over an empty box that both Ren and Akito had tricked themselves into believing was meaningful. Akito is pained to admit it's an empty box and pained even further to realize that yet another member of the zodiac has broken from their curse, this time Hiro. The insulated world she grew up in is falling apart, and a "god" who was never told "no" feels broken and scared as others openly turn against her.
Just as viewers finally have a handle on Akito's psychology and have become somewhat sympathetic to her, she proceeds to prove that just because she's aware that she's messed up doesn't make her actions any less messed up. Taking her mom's knife, she stabs Kureno, the man who's always tried to help her -- even after his curse bond was broken. Akito says this is punishment for his "kindness," that rejecting her entirely a la Momiji would have been preferable to him staying by her side. As Kureno bleeds out from the knife to the back, the anime cuts to a dead bird, an ominous image for the bloodiest Fruits Basket episode yet.
New episodes of Fruits Basket: The Final Season premiere Mondays, subbed on Crunchyroll and dubbed on Funimation.
