Hello and welcome, Ultraman Connection readers! Hello… and goodbye?
As we come to the end of another Ultraman season, the final episode recaps are always the hardest to post. It seems like we just started Arc and now we’ve already reached the last episode? Even compared to other Ultraman shows, this one felt like it just flew by, and the thought of how to summarize the arc of the past 25 episodes brings bittersweet feelings to mind.
The famous saying goes, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Fittingly enough, episode 25 “Time to Run, Yuma!” has many endings, but also many beginnings and unique starting points of its own. That conflict between ending something, to put it into the past behind us and beginning something which will lead into a new future, forms the central theme of this episode.
Before we go into this episode in detail though, be warned that those details involve major, open spoilers about episode 25. If you haven’t watched it for yourself yet, go take care of that first then come back here!
All done? Well then, get ready… get set, and run!
Sweed hasn’t given up on her plan to force Yuma to separate from Arc with various tricks. However, her bait has become perilously enticing with this latest attempt. Before, her illusions only presented Yuma with abstract promises of what he desired – a normal life without Kaiju, without the loss of his parents, without the hardships of the last 16 years. Yuma quickly shook it off in the previous episode, especially thanks to the arrival of his friends in SKIP to rescue him.

This week, she makes her offer even more tantalizing by presenting Yuma with his parents, seemingly real versions of them in the flesh. Even this scene shows where Sweed’s illusion falls short though. Yuma’s house has no furniture, nothing hanging on the walls, nothing in the kitchen which is even bare of food.
In other words, Sweed lacks the imagination to truly create an authentic world, one that would attract Yuma away from his own life and his responsibilities outside of the dream. She even admits as much, claiming that Yuma and other “lesser” beings have such simple desires that they paradoxically can be powerful enough to change the world.
But are Yuma’s desires really that simple? He certainly misses his parents, dearly enough that he almost gives into Sweed’s demands. But at that moment, he’s stopped and remembers what truly is the most important, the most real desire he has – and thus, the one desire that is the most difficult to follow.
Seemingly, Yuma’s father – his real, authentic remembered self as Yuma knows him – stops him from giving into Sweed. It’s not just Yuma’s memory of his parents though, it’s also Arc speaking to him in this dream. It might seem like an odd detail… unless you remember that the actor playing Yuma’s father also voices Arc.
That’s the key, something so obvious about Arc that it’s been easily overlooked through this whole show. The power represented by Arc did not appear from a vacuum, from a magical muse that has no real basis in the world. Yuma didn’t just make a cool looking superhero one day for no reason. He created a hero that he imagined would be the strongest, powerful enough to stop tragedies like the one which took away his parents. He imagined someone with all the strength and kindness and steadfast courage he aspired to, just as any kid would look up to their parents.

In other words, everything about Arc was born out of Yuma’s tragedy. It may have been adopted and animated by Rution’s arrival, but even Rution’s mission on Earth was inspired by the death of Yuma’s parents in the first place! Contrary to what Sweed assumes, Yuma abandoning his memories and leaving the painful past behind does not bring his parents back. Rather it would be a complete betrayal of everything they wished for him, everything condensed into his father’s last words urging him forward.
I started weeping when the scene changed to show Yuma as a child, as he was 16 years ago, grasping the Arc Riser in this dream. Heck, I’m crying right now remembering it! That scene is one of the most powerful moments from any Ultraman series I’ve witnessed, and it destroyed me watching it as it aired the first time.
Ultraman Arc makes the eloquent point that the hardest thing we will ever have to do in our lives is to live and move forward after tragedies, just like Yuma’s. The impossible feat that Yuma and Arc achieve isn’t just miraculously transforming the power of the Galaxy Armor into light which restores the destroyed city from last week’s episode. No, the more remarkable feat of strength is the choice Yuma makes every day – and the one each of us makes – to keep running forward, into the future.
It truly is the deciding factor in this finale, sealing Guilebaku’s demise and Sweed’s defeat. The sad thing is that Sweed even seems saddened by her inability to comprehend Arc and Yuma’s strength together. She truly wants the power to save her home, but as we’ve seen, she lacks the imagination to see the world as it is, and to seek its future in those impossible hopes.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the final fight of the show where Arc confronts Sweed after she transforms herself into a new Ze Su Gate that will channel the destructive supernova energy to the Earth. In a final paradoxical twist, Arc seals the gate and destroys Sweed with the very thing that first opened it 16 years ago – the Monohorn.
Sweed never saw it coming.

That final battle was so bombastically explosive that I was yelling through most of it. Even though the denouement following Sweed’s death didn’t feature world-crossing laser beams or flying kaiju projectiles, it was just as passionately charged and gut-wrenching. Yuma realizes (maybe after seeing other Ultraman heroes in other dimensions) that another battle is still happening in space, and decides to leave the Earth to go back to Rution’s home. After all, Biorno and others are still trying to stand up against Ze Su’s plans. Now that the gates to the Earth have been sealed, he might seek to destroy another world for the sake of saving his own, in the same way.
I thought the show might have ended there, with Yuma and Arc gone, with the Kaiju vanished from the Earth, and with SKIP disbanding in the wake of this relative new peace. It might seem fitting to propel our characters out into the world with another loss, even if losing Yuma to an intergalactic road trip isn’t exactly the same as dying.
Although I don’t know, given Shu’s reaction you would’ve thought Yuma would be leaving forever!

Yuma runs into the future in order to make it a better one though. At the end of the day, that hope that things will be better – maybe not today, or tomorrow, or even 16 years from now – keeps all of us running alongside of him too.
And until we meet again, with the next Ultraman series in the future, I hope you will keep running too. In the meantime, stay tuned right here to Ultraman Connection as always.