As we made through hip-deep corpses and this arc of Mugen no Juunin: Immortal drags on and on, I can’t help but ask myself – would the denouement of the series be any different if this were all cut out?  And if not, would it have been smarter to do so?  I can’t answer of course, not because I don’t want to but because I literally can’t – I don’t know where Immortal goes from here.  But this all feels very divorced from the rest of the story, somewhere between narrative navel-gazing on a theme the mangaka was interested in and self-indulgent hack-and-slash.

Ah well – nothing to be done, it is what it is and the anime staff makes the decisions it makes.  I just know we’re seeing a manga that ran for almost 20 years adapted in two cours and we’re going on our fourth episode of this arc, which is a curious thing to be sure.  At least this time around the time spent in Burando’s torture chamber was limited, although we got plenty of shots of the results of his handiwork.  Manji-san appears for maybe two seconds, with the bulk of the episode following Rin and Doa as they try and figure out how to rescue the respective men in their lives.

The most surprising development here was Burando’s concise note to Habaki – “Success”.  That was not a direction I expected things to go, though the evidence here is that success is a term Burando may be defining rather loosely.  But before all that we have the rescue mission, as well as time for a little backstory for Doa and Isaku.  The pair manage to track Habaki back to the secret entrance to the dungeons beneath Edo Castle, and set about devising a way to try and infiltrate it.  This is certainly Rin in proactive mode, which is a good thing for her character to be sure, though I wish it could have developed under different circumstances.

Rin recruits Hyakurin to help, which she does by stirring up a sort of pitchfork mob of the women whose husbands have been abducted for Burando’s experiments.  I assume the scene we saw with her and Giichi was a flashback and the unborn child in question the one we were told died a few episodes back, but it’s not totally clear – clarity being one of the casualties of the obscene amount of characters and timelines Hamasaki and Fukami are stuffing into this adaptation.  There’s a certain irony in a member of the Mugai-ryuu acting to assist the rescue (at least in theory) of a member of the Itou-Ryuu, but I suppose since the former doesn’t really exist anymore I doubt she’s care much.

Things don’t end well for Isaku, which was pretty much a given, but Manji of course is still alive in those catacombs somewhere.  Whether Doa will be able to muster the will to help Rin rescue him is unclear, but Rin is certainly going to have to fight her way out of this one way or the other.  The trick with the explosives at the entrance was certainly a clever if risky move, but with Habaki aware something big is going down things aren’t going to get any easier for her.  I just hope that whatever happens to resolve this situation, it happens next week.