You had me at “more alpaca doing capoeira”.

This incredibly dense, fascinating and vexing taxi ride continues, only three episodes from the finish now.  Once more in the interests of trying to keep everything straight in my head (and because I’m moving in four days and insanely pressed for time) I’m going to bulletize this episode.

• One of the fundamental tenets of Odd Taxi for me is that there are no coincidences.  But I’m still not totally sure how Homosapiens fits with everything else, apart from Baba being Yamamoto-san’s client.  The conversation between Shibagaki and Nagashima was certainly amusing, but this is the one thread I can’t yet tie in with the quilt.
• That joke about the smoking areas at Shin-Osaka made me LOL even though it was very inside the beltway.  Osaka is the epicentre of Japanese comedy, after all.
• Odokawa, Odokawa…  Man, does this guy ever have a pair – but he’s got a serious death wish no matter what he says, and it was almost granted this week.  Trying to blackmail gangsters is generally not an advisable course of action, and seemingly getting the upper hand on Dobu has made Odokawa-san cocky.
• It was great that Shirakawa-san came to the rescue.  And as with the first one, the capoeira scene was stupendous.  But I can’t help but ask why Shirakawa was there – in an empty building site at night.  Was she tipped off somehow last week and I forgot?  The only other reason I can think of is that she had access to the GPS data – and that would be pretty far out of left field if it were the case.
• Best gag of the episode, no question, was Odokawa’s “best three” things he can’t figure out why anyone would get involved in (capoeira, hammer throw, and uppers).  It’s even more hilarious when you’ve seen how obsessed Japan is with having a “best three” for everything.
• Sekiguchi’s tracking skills are indeed impressive, as are Yano’s freestyling chops.  Those Tokyo train melodies were one of the things that really stayed with me on my first trip to Japan.  I just love them – I even had one (Gotanda Station) as my ringtone for a while.
• Title drop – “oddtaxi”, courtesy Dobu-san.
• Dobu-san is a troubling character, perhaps the most in the series.  The more I see of him the more he comes off as a kind of overgrown child, rather than someone genuinely evil.  Yet he’s obviously done terrible things.  For Odokawa, Shirakawa still having feelings for him may be enough to push him over the edge, but he seemed to be wavering on Dobu too.

All I can say about Odokawa’s master plan is it has way too many moving parts to work.  He’s relying on too much stuff that’s totally outside his control.  And now that the crime boss is sticking his snout into it, things are going to get even more complicated.  There’s still the matter of the missing daughter of the boss’ classmate, too – and that mystery deepens even further with that news report at the end of the episode.  Odd Taxi certainly has a lot of plates spinning, just like its protagonist, but I give it a better chance than him of sticking the landing.