Steins;Gate stripped of its time-loop weight is exactly what it sounds like: Okabe making terrible fried rice, Kurisu pretending she doesn't care, Daru being exactly as useless as always. The show trades apocalyptic stakes for the specific comedy of watching these people exist together when nothing is trying to destroy them. Four episodes of your favorite characters allowed to just be awkward and ordinary in a kitchen or a clothing store. It's IBM advertising disguised as fan service, which means it knows exactly what it's doing and doesn't pretend otherwise. The plot has zero ambition, zero tension, zero reason to exist beyond "remember when you loved these people?" That's the entire point. Sometimes comfort is the only story that matters.

Okabe and the lab members find themselves in unexpected situations where cognitive computing and IBM technology become their unlikely saviors. In the cooking episode, Mayuri and Kurisu set out to make fried chicken with the help of an Upa-shaped cognitive computing terminal, only to discover they lack the right ingredients, so the system helps them find something else to cook. In the navigation episode, Okabe and Kurisu quarrel and each ask Upa for a route home that avoids the other, but it sends them the long way so they can reconcile. The fashion episode has Kurisu using Upa to suggest new outfits for Okabe and Daru, who seem to wear the same clothes every day. Finally, after complaints from Mr. Braun, Upa leads a meeting about moving the lab, to Okabe's dismay. These four short comedy episodes, made in collaboration with IBM, bring the Steins;Gate cast into everyday problems solved with the help of a very capable computer.