Ah, season penultimate week – there’s nothing quite like it for anime drama.  For multi-cour series this tends to be when the shit really starts to hit the fan, as the intermediate climax is set up.  Just as season-break episodes tend to be better than series finales penultimate eps tend to be better than final ones, so a careful observer will have noticed that for multi-season series, this week is often about as good as it gets.  But of course, there are exceptions to that rule…

I have no idea what the future holds for Dororo in this regard, of course, but I can say that this week’s effort certainly held up its end of the bargain.  I can also say that the storytelling here is an order of magnitude better than your typical anime, so I’m pretty confident Dororo has the chops to be even better than what we’re already seeing.  I confess I’m a little bit surprised at how quickly things are moving in some respects – the cliffhanger at the end of this episode is one I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to happen anywhere in the first cour.

“The Story of Banmon” started surprising me right from the beginning, in fact – an unexpected cold open, a reprise of last week’s climax shifted to Hyakkimaru’s perspective.  I more or less expected these long-lost brothers to be ships passing in the night for now, but there was a meeting in fact.  Tahoumaru certainly didn’t suspect the truth and I didn’t get the sense that Hyakkimaru did either, but what Tahoumaru saw will certainly enable him to connect the rest of the dots much more quickly.  Dororo extracts some payment for services rendered (which I think is more than fair, under the circumstances) and Tahoumaru sends Dororo and Aniki off to Ishikawa to spend some of it.

With that, really, the die has been cast.  Mutsu and Hyogo make their report to Daigo (which I assume was an absolute responsibility, not a blurring of where their loyalties lie).  Daigo and Nuinotaka can now have no doubt that their firstborn survived, and while their reactions could hardly be more different, neither can go on living until  the sins of the past have been accounted for.  And Tahoumaru – professional eavesdropper that he is – of course overhears their conversation, and pretty much knows the truth himself.  That genie is now forever out of the bottle.

Meanwhile Dororo finally has a few coins to click together and somewhere to spend them, and she’s rather a kid in a candy story in Ishikawa’s capital.  Food is her initial obsession, naturally, but soon enough she’s distracted by a play – one which depicts the triumph of Daigo over the demons which plague his lands, resulting in their enrichment.  The irony practically drips off this, of course, but it seems in spite of the domain’s recent downturn in fortunes Daigo is still held in high regard by his people, which is going to complicate things later on to be sure.  At the play Dororo learns of the Banmon, a wall which is all that remains of a fort that stood between Ishikawa and the neighboring Asakura domain, and is supposedly haunted by terrifying demons every night.

Sensing financial opportunity, Dororo leads Hyakkimaru to the wall, where the pair meet Sukeroku (fittingly, since Dororo is offering the best storytelling we’ve seen in anime since the last series featuring a character with that name).  Banmon has become something of a no-man’s land, with the Asakura shooting anyone who tries to cross over and nailing them to the wall.  Sukeroku has thus been separated from his family, caught on the wrong side of the wall when the great battle between the domains occurred.  With the Asakura patrolling by day, the only time Sukeroku might cross back is at night when the demons come out to play – and Dororo in a rare moment of philanthropy offers Aniki’s services for free in order to help him do it.

While the Kyuubi, the nine-tailed foxfire youkai that appears, is undeniably frightening I can’t shake the idea that it’s not Hyakkimaru’s enemy.  They appear to do battle, certainly, but whatever harm the Kyuubi does to Hyakkimaru seems incidental – it seems to be trying to restrain rather than kill him (and to prevent Dororo from crossing into Asakura – perhaps to protect her).   There’s also the matter of color – there’s no evidence of the red which Hyakkimaru’s eyes see as evil intent, only the blue-green which is the Kyuubi’s natural color.  And it flees when Daigo and his men arrive, which hardly seems like something an evil youkai would do.

Yes, Daigo arrives – and with that, we’ve already reached a huge nexus point in the story.  Biwamaru’s reaction when he sees the Hall of Hell – “This is very bad” – seems the understatement of the moment.  And it’s Tahoumaru (note the difference in the way Hyakkimaru perceives his aura as opposed to his father’s) whose next actions are the most fascinating.  He’s what Nate Silver might call a “tipping point state” – we pretty much know where everyone else in the main cast comes down on this confrontation, but Tahoumaru is a mystery.  He has strong conflicting forces pulling at him – his innate decency and sense of honor battling with his loyalty to his father and his domain.

Dororo is an example of the power of great storytelling in anime – there’s just no substitute for it.  This series has no gimmicks, no tropes, no pandering or even ingratiation – just a superbly-crafted premise which carries all the dramatic weight under its own power.  That it’s Tezuka explains that to an extent, of course, but this version is so changed from the source material that a great deal of credit must go to the anime staff too.  Whatever happens next week, there’s a full cour’s worth of story to follow – and I can’t wait to see how it pulls all the fascinating elements and characters the series has introduced together.