WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Link Click Episode 8, "Lost Signal," now streaming on Funimation.
Link Click is all about time travel but, in its more recent episodes, the anime has been crossing over from sci-fi into straight horror. Case in point: Lu Guang's attempts to keep Cheng Xiaoshi out of Emma's murder case prove to be futile thanks to Cheng Xiaoshi's strong sense of justice. He's not someone to look away when someone else needs help, whereas Lu Guang simply wants to keep the two from getting caught up in another mess.
In service of that, Lu Guang is still trying to keep his friend in the dark about who the murder victim is -- for the sake of protecting him -- but Episode 8 of Link Click only ends up echoing the message of the first episode: Good intentions don't always lead to good outcomes, and innocent people may get hurt as a result.
To throw his partner off the scent of danger, when he catches Cheng Xiaoshi looking over his shoulder in the episode, Lu Guang switches out Emma's photo with a grainy one of the suspect -- a seasoned and meticulous serial killer. Then, because Lu Guang has the final say in whether the time travellers accept a job or not, the two turn down the police officer's offer. Cheng Xiaoshi tries to find out why but he doesn't get far into his interrogation before Qiao Ling, along with their friend Xu Shanshan, arrives with a request.
When she was in university, she had been in a (sort of) relationship with a young man named Dong Yi. Because Dong Yi was going into post-graduate studies, Xu Shanshan chose to do the same in order to be close to them. At a karaoke party, Dong Yi told Xu Shanshan something but because she was so drunk, she can't remember what he said. Fearing the worst, she had never asked Dong Yi to repeat it. Now, she needs Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang's help on the matter.
So, Cheng Xiaoshi time travels back to the karaoke party, where he dismisses the advances of a drunken stranger. Because of Xu Shanshan's presence, he ends up drinking an inordinate amount of alcohol himself to calm his nerves, but before he can extract the information from Dong Yi, something catches his eye: a young man in a baseball cap who looks suspiciously like the serial killer in the surveillance photo.
Immediately, he chases him into a dark alleyway, where Lu Guang warns that someone is behind him. He pretends not to notice, fake vomiting, and finally really vomiting, in order to wait for the opportune moment to strike. The suspect turns out to be the creepy flirt from the party and for the moment, it looks like the danger has been averted.
In the present timeline, Cheng Xiaoshi's takedown of the creep made it to the papers -- and Xu Shanshan's photo was even published, too. Unfortunately, Cheng Xiaoshi had been so drunk that he still hadn't been able to hear what Dong Yi said but, luckily, Lu Guang did. Dong Yi stayed for post-graduate studies for the same reason that Xu Shanshan did: he wanted to be with her as long as possible before he would be forced to leave the city because of his father. But now, he knows that not being with her hurts more, and he asked Xu Shanshan to accompany him to his interview.
Xu Shanshan sends a cryptic message to their group chat: "I have received the clue. My new friend," which instantly raises alarm bells, causing Cheng Xiaoshi to demand Qiao Ling call her. However, before she can even do that, Xu Shanshan appears to calls her. The voice on the other end isn't their friend, though, telling them they "will show up as promised."
Judging by the timeline, the killer must have been killing at least six years ago. Because of Cheng Xiaoshi's heroics, Xu Shanshan has had a target on her back since that day. The two messages -- on the group chat and the phone call -- are kept deliberately vague, but it's clear that the suspect connected the dots between Xu Shanshan and the trio. The extent to which he knows about their photo-time-traveling abilities, however, isn't. Is his motive merely to shut the three of them up or is it something more sinister, such as manipulating their ability to do more crimes? Link Click's cliffhanger leaves a lot of tantalizing mysteries to be unraveled in its next episode.
