Sabikui Bisco certainly hasn’t been bad, but last week’s ep was the weakest.  And this one was definitely better.  I’d say I’m probably one more good episode away from committing.  Unfortunately it seems next week will focus on Chiroru, whose presence to excess was the main reason Episode 4 wasn’t so great.  Maybe it’ll surprise me, maybe not, but this is generally the way of bubble series.  They bob and weave back and forth either side of the cutoff, sometimes for much of their run.  But on the whole I think this series has more positives than negatives going for it.

As teased, this ep mostly took place at a camp of children (“Tetsujin Town”) out in the desert, led by a boy named Nuts (Fujiwara Natsumi).  Nuts (say it in English) and his crew have been left alone after all the adults went to the city to earn money for medicine to cure their rust (many of them winding up in rabbit suits, apparently).  Except as it turns out they don’t have rust at all but a minor disease called shellskin, and Kurokowa was only lying about that to get cheap labor out of the adults.  Bisco convinces Nuts to take the two of them prisoner by showing off his reward poster, as he’s hungry and knows he can escape whenever he feels like it.

Meanwhile, Pawoo has a rather dark encounter with a pair of old-timers she saves from a giant spider.  They invite her back to their place to fix her bike in gratitude, but it turns out they’re serial killers who poison and rob everybody they can in order to hoard junk.  She’s too smart to drink the tea, and soon enough it becomes clear to the couple that they’d have no chance of beating her in a fair fight.  To be honest I’m still not exactly sure what happened there at the end – did they blow themselves up, or just seal themselves inside their bunker?  In any case it was kind of a classic horror film story within a story.

As for the A-plot, Bisco befriends one of the boys, Kousuke, as he’s pretending to be a prisoner and enjoying the local seafood.  And Panda easily cures’ the kids shellskin while causing little Etsuko to fall in love with him. Nuts is desperate for Bisco’s reward money to buy new weapons to fight off the annual attacks of flying blowfish – another in the litany of amusingly bizarre creatures in Sabikui Bisco.  But when the blowfish (no sign of Hootie) attack early Bisco takes matters into his own hands, and takes them out in exchange for information about the surviving train system from rail buff Kosuke (because he can’t read Kanji).

This series continues to play as a very old school, very traditional anime sci-fi – with elements of mecha (or at least hints) and some classic Gainax-styled oddball characters.  I’m pretty sure it has the elements to succeed – I think the key is going to be whether it’s able to balance those elements in anime form.  I believe there’s still a place for this sort of series in anime, but we certainly go through seasons without anything filling it sometimes.  That makes me glad to have Sabikui Bisco around, and hopeful that it can finally close the deal.