Do not try to mess with Lovecraft’s head.
What They Say:
Kicked out of his orphanage and on the verge of starving to death, Nakajima Atsushi meets some strange men. One of them, Dazai Osamu, is a suicidal man attempting to drown himself in broad daylight. The other, bespectacled Kunikida Doppo, nervously stands by flipping through a notepad. Both are members of the “Armed Detective Agency” said to solve incidents that even the military and police won’t touch. Atsushi ends up accompanying them on a mission to eliminate a man-eating tiger that’s been terrorizing the population…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The fast pacing speeds on as Atsushi’s struggle against the Guild becomes even more intense. Each team is using the ignorant police as weapons against their enemies, resulting Kyouka assuming she was helping by bringing them into the picture but in fact ended up being burned for it and even having to attack another innocent person without any abilities because the Guild was one step ahead. And so, Atsushi’s bad luck culminates in the Guild finally nabbing the tiger they’ve been after all this time, thanks to Mark Twain the sniper with the most violent yet adorable Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn you’ve ever seen, and the great white whale ship which is, of course, called the Moby Dick. The more Guild members we’re introduced to, the more I realize just how direct these literary allusions have been, and that those more versed in Japanese literature must’ve been experiencing this all along. These naturally continue to be about as superficial as possible, the definition of “judging a book by its cover,” but at least Lovecraft’s bibliography has become such a known genre unto itself that every time he unleashes some of his powers, it’s easy to accept them and say, “Yes, that is a Lovecraftian monster.” With no time wasted, the Guild finally proves that they deserve to be the main antagonists of this arc as each of their coordinated efforts flawlessly turn the best of each of the other teams against themselves to execute an even more horrific plan than anything we’ve seen from the Port Mafia in their time.
The opening has hinted toward this possibility, but the ultimate goal of this extremely packed episode is to set up the need for an alliance between two factions that have considered each other archenemies for years. Although Kyouka is a more recent example, Dazai is the man who would have the strongest opinions about such an idea, but he’s no fool, and will do whatever it takes to reach the least awful conclusion. His absence likely would’ve been much longer if all the events of this episode hadn’t been so tightly consolidated, but there’s still a great deal of catching up to be done with him and the aftermath of when we last saw him. If Ango is still capable of assisting him, it could make for an even more interesting development in his continued interconnectedness by bringing him back into the world of the Port Mafia in a different context.
As meaningless as most of the references to classic novels may be, they do get a bit more amusingly meta when the characters quote passages as existing in their world. Atsushi does so in this episode, even going so far as to try to remember the name of the author, that being his own name. Perhaps one isn’t meant to think too much about these moments, but it does beg the question of whether the connections will ever be acknowledged or even serve a deeper purpose.
In Summary:
Every episode seems more and more aware that there’s a lot of story to cover without that many episodes remaining, and continues to speed up to account for it. This may be the most eventful yet, building to a slight catharsis in service of a paradigm shift that will be hard to take for many.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Roku 3, Sceptre X425BV-FHD 42″ Class LCD HDTV.