I’ll say this for the second episode of Takt Op. Destiny, it took me some places where I didn’t expect to go.  The co-production arrangement here is apparently Madhouse and MAPPA each doing a block of episodes.  Madhouse did the first, MAPPA the second.  And while generally speaking this week wasn’t as visually impressive as the premiere (though it didn’t have as many chances to show off, either) I found the episode itself to be more interesting.  That’s a tradeoff I’ll take every time.

In the first case it’s a little surprising to jump into an episode-long flashback sequence in the second episode.  With no preamble either – just dumped right into 2037 (for a bit), then ten years after to what seems like a year or so before the events of the premiere.  Takt is Takuto (which is basically the Japanese pronunciation of “Takt”), the son of a famous conductor who died in what I’m assuming was a D2 attack.  And Destiny is Cosette (a name we heard dropped in the premiere) a normal-looking teenaged girl who – along with her older sister Anna (there’s mention of a third sister , in New York) – was tasked with looking after Takuto after the death of his father.

This semi-normal chain of events was more interesting to me than the dystopian one, to be honest, and altogether a lot less trope-driven.  It felt quite strange in a good way, in fact.  Takuto basically mopes around the house and plays his father’s piano, Cosette nags him to take a bath and get a little sun.  Music is apparently not totally banned at this point, though tightly controlled, and a guy named Sagan (which I’m assuming is a tribute) seems to have brought the D2 attacks to a halt.  Cosette and Anna nag Takuto to play at a local festival called “Symphonica” where some tightly-regulated music will be allowed, but it’s not until they leave him no option that Takuto shows up to play.

This thee-way interaction is surprisingly low-key and believable after the premiere.  And the piano music is again lovely, and reasonably well-animated too.  It’s mostly Beethoven again – Cosette (who can play, as it turns out) is fond of the Sonata Pathétique – but once the festival begins it switches over to jazz.  It’s not hard to be winning with classic public domain music, but the context in which it’s used is pretty smart.  Altogether the writing here was better than I expected based on the premiere.

After last week we already kind of know how this is going to play out, or at least end.  I’m not exactly sure why everyone was so surprised at the D2 attack spawned by the performance – perhaps more details will be forthcoming – but in said attack Takuto is seriously wounded and Cosette, it seems, would have died if not for her necklace starting to glow and emitting a sprite of some sort who turns her into the sugar-snorting “Destiny” we met last week.  I’ll withhold judgement on this whole premise until we learn more about the underpinnings of it, but I will say that so far I liked Cosette a fair bit better than Destiny.

There remain a lot of cautionary notes with Takt Op. Destiny.  Writer Yoshimura Kiyoko doesn’t inspire much confidence with the resume (she wrote Last Exile: Fam for crying out loud), and as we know that role is the most important on an original series.  And the whole plot still strikes me as pretty bonkers.  But this episode did surprise me with how grounded and effecting it was, and if the series can do that once there’s no inherent reason it couldn’t do so again.  If nothing else it’s a lot harder to pigeonhole after this ep, and that’s a step in the right direction.