After a one-week hiatus (it seems very odd to have broadcast an episode on New Year’s Day and then be on break January 8th, but I don’t write the schedule) Mugen no Juunin: Immortal picks up right where it left off.  Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your perspective I suppose, but I confess that with current arc some of the series’ charm has worn off for me.  It’s still superbly directed and it still makes an impact, but I’d be lying if I said I was enjoying it.

There are a few reasons for that, some obvious and some less so.  As an anime I think Immortal is suffering from too many characters syndrome, which was probably inevitable given how much material Hamasaki and Fukami are being forced to cram into two cours.  Naturally this has been something that’s built over time, but it’s genuinely a distraction for me now.  My sense is that they didn’t want to cut characters altogether, so they kept everyone of consequence – but by consequence, there’s not enough narrative oxygen to go around and everyone is straining for breath.  It’s hard to care about new characters when they keep adding to the pile, and there’s less focus on the core cast than I would like.

Most obviously, we have the tenor of the current arc.  I don’t want to label it as torture porn because I think that’s too dismissive of mangaka Samura Hiroaki, and there remains an artistry to what he and Hamasaki are doing, even here.  But frankly it does feel that way a lot of the time, as if the story is glorying in the carnage a little too much.  That’s necessary to underpin Burando’s descent into madness, but frankly I don’t feel like I need to see Burando’s descent into madness.  There was plenty going on in the story that interested me already.

Things proceed more or less as one might have expected.   Poor old Dewanosuke keeps getting hacked up and stitched back together, each time a toll being taken on his body.  Manji (who’s barely a presence in this episode, despite being at the center of the de-butchery) disdainfully warns Burando that he’s following a dangerous path.  Burando convincingly acts like he cares for Dewanosuke’s survival, and well enough that the simple man seems to believe him.  But Habaki (who’s definitely emerged as the true villain of the piece) isn’t going to take Burando’s word that Dewanosuke is now immortal – and quickly enough proves that he’s not.

Burando seems to think blood type (a new concept to him, even with his Dutch training) has something to do with the increasing flood of new failures, but I suspect that a curse simply can’t be transferred from one person to another via science.  I guess we’re supposed to feel sympathy for Burando as he slowly goes insane, then finally surrenders his humanity altogether as his only means of coping with what he’s become.  But while he’s clearly being manipulated by Habaki – who’s basically pulling all the strings at this point – I don’t see Burando as any kind of a victim here.  He had other options besides becoming a butcher – he chose not to pursue them.

I don’t know how all this is going to end, but I hope it ends soon.  If Burando fails as I expect him to Manji won’t be worth much to Habaki at that point, so something will have to give.  We do get some brief cut-ins to Rin, Doua and Isaku, but that storyline descends quickly into butchery too (and perhaps ends badly for Isaku).  Rin has already figured out who those two really are, but at this point the Ittou-Ryuu have become so normalized for her that it doesn’t even seem to matter.  If the spine of Immortal is Rin freeing herself from the curse of living for revenge, I think it’s clear she’s already made considerable progress.  I just we’d get back to focusing on that.