WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Talentless Nana Episode 4, "Healing," now streaming on Funimation.
The question looming over Nana Hiiragi’s quest to murder every single superpowered being in her class has always been how she will avoid suspicion as people continue to die (or disappear) around her. Episode 4 of Talentless Nana offers a seemingly perfect solution to Nana’s predicament: the constantly mentioned but never seen “enemies of humanities” has become the perfect cover for Nana.
Nana comes up with a secret plan to divert the attention of Kyoya, and gain the trust of her classmates. She pretends to hear the minds of the enemies of humanity and rushes to the room of another classmate Michiru Inukai, who has the power to heal any wound. Nana pretends to warn Michiru about the existence of an enemy attack, then secretly stabs herself with an ice pick, then hides the weapon, so that she can claim to be stabbed by the invisible enemy. This not only made Nana the class hero but also led her classmates to rely more on her powers in order to catch the enemies, so she is successfully elected class leader as a result.
With this cunning move, Nana has now gained several advantages. Everyone on the island now truly believes that “enemies of humanity” exist and are out to get them. Their textbook even introduces various powers possessed by these creatures such as invisibility, making them seem all the more realistic. The stabbing event cements this impression and creates a very convenient cover to explain away the classmates’ disappearances.
Everyone thinks that Nana has the power to read minds, so they not only believe everything Nana says about others is true but also trusts that she is the only person who can detect the existence of the “enemies of humanity.” Therefore, she is the only person that can conjure up the existence of these so-called “enemies” whenever she wants, and no one can say otherwise.
Because Kyoya is a rational person, he continues to cast doubt on his own theories regarding Nana. Kyoya cannot attribute any proper motive to Nana’s behaviors and does not understand why Nana would kill two innocent classmates and then stab herself. Without a substantial motive or any evidence, Kyoya will have a hard time convincing his classmates that Nana is the real killer, putting him at a major disadvantage.
But just when Nana seemed to have gained the upper hand, yet another one of her classmates is showing up with very definitive proof of her crimes. Tsunekichi Hatadaira is a punk-looking guy who claims to have the power of premonition, or the ability to see the future. His power is displayed in the pictures he took, which show Nana strangling him in the future.
Tsunekichi claims he used to be a good student, but when he saw his future of getting a zero on a test, he overstudied and ended up having a fever, missing the test and getting that fated zero. He realized that the future he sees cannot be changed, so he stopped working hard altogether. His nihilistic outlook seems to have affected the way he sees life as well, so even though he saw Nana potentially murdering him, he does not seem to worry. His behavior brings up an interesting question: did he actually cause his future doom by showing Nana the picture?
Another suspicious thing about Tsunekichi is that he actually foresaw Nana pushing Nanao off the cliff way back in Episode 1. This means he knew about Nana perhaps even before she showed up on the island -- remember Nana killed Nanao soon after she arrived. Why didn’t Tsunekichi tell anyone about his discovery before or right after Nanao disappeared? Is it simply to blackmail Nana, or does he have any ulterior motive?
