Hey, that guy in the title is still in the series!

I would be tempted to poke a little fun at Inuyashiki for adding a giant asteroid hurtling towards Earth to the already heady mix, but it kind of did that to itself with Mari’s “What is this, “Deep Impact”?” remark.  A throwaway line, true, but a good general indication that this series doesn’t seem to be taking itself too seriously – which, given how utterly absurd it is when you stop and think about it, is definitely a good thing.  While that line may have been a throwaway I’m confident the asteroid itself is not – that has “major plot point” written all over it.  Might Inuyashiki and Hiro have to team up to stop it from crashing into the Earth?

For the first time in what seems like quite a while, the spotlight wasn’t mostly on Hiro this week – though he certainly still held the lead role.  Inuyashiki Mari actually got her first real focus of the series, first through an encounter with a classmate named Oda (heh) who’s father is a famous mangaka.  Turns out that’s what Mari wants to do as well, which is all well and good except that her interactions with the young man in question reveal her to be a rather petty and churlish girl (in other words, a teenager).

It’s when she spots her father and Andou-kun together that thing really heat up, though.  A kid in her position would naturally have their imagination run wild there, I suppose, and the sequence where Mari’s does just that is pretty hilarious.  But it soon enough becomes clear to Mari (who her father says “hasn’t spoken to him in years”) that Inuyashiki-san is not the man she assumed he was.  She witnesses him performing miracles at the hospital, and mistakenly assumes he’s the “God” that Hiro has been build up as.  Then she sees him blast off into the sky to fight a fire, which one would assume pretty much removes all doubt in her mind that something very big is afoot.

Meanwhile, as last week’s cliffhanger suggested, the SWAT team busts in on the Watanabe house and makes things worse for everyone.  Why they had to shoot Shion and Grandma is a bit of a mystery to me, if I’m honest, but it’s yet more proof for Hiro that trying to be good is pointless and humanity deserves what it gets.  Fortunately he’s able to do for these two what he couldn’t for him mother – heal (or resurrect) them – and he sets them up in an apartment somewhere with a fat bank account while he goes up to extract his revenge on the police for what they did.

Truthfully, when a series is as awash in violence and gore as Inuyashiki the impact of that is dulled pretty quickly.  This is all so over the top that it’s hard to be too shocked or bothered by it – Hiro takes out an entire police station (except for one cop played by Sugita Tomokazu, who he leaves alive to watch him destroy Japan’s police), and then several special forces squads waiting for him outside.  The personal side of the story is more interesting, as broad as it can sometimes be – I’d like to be spending more time on the Inuyashiki family dynamic, for example.  But Inuyashiki is what it is, and there’s not much point in expecting something different now.