It’s not like I was worried that Golden Kamuy was going to get less weird in its time away, but it certainly didn’t.  It remains off the grid completely, this one.  A miracle of imagination of the sort I have a hard time wrapping my head around, even after a lifetime of watching movies and TV and reading novels, and decades with anime and manga.  How in the world does Noda Satoru come up with this stuff?  The most normal thing in a GK episode is probably going to be stranger than anything else you see that day.

You’d be forgiven for forgetting about it in the madness to follow, but there is a seemingly important main plot moment at the start of the episode.  It seems to be the seedling of a plan to win the day – lure Hijikata and Tsurumi to the same place and steal their skins while they’re fighting each other.  I’d need to know more about this before deciding whether my first-flush skepticism is justified.  Sugimoto is a smart guy and a decent tactician, but long game strategizing isn’t necessarily his strength.  That can, however, is soon enough kicked down the curb for a while.

Master Heita (Ishida Akira) is quite a piece of work.  He will of course turn out to be yet another tattooed Abashiri serial killer and general nut job, but that isn’t immediately obvious.  Sugimoto and Asirpa save him after he almost falls off a cliff (it’s immediately odd that the people whose help he’s calling for don’t come).  In return, he gives them advice about hunting for gold.  He uses a “digging” method rather than panning (a glass-bottom box), first of all.  But the main thing is he’s not looking for gold at all.  Rather, he’s collecting “the white” – the platinum that gold prospectors considered a nuisance waste product and discarded back into the rivers.  Where it remains to be taken, now that Japan  is catching up to the world in finding a use for it.

The complicating factor in all this is the presence of a Wenkamuy – a man-eating bear the bounty on which was the initial draw bringing Sugimoto, Asirpa and Shiraishi into the area in the first place.  Asirpa is immediately suspicious of Heita’s claims to have seen the bear close by, but he seems very sure of himself.  In truth he’s anything but – a victim of multiple personality disorder whose psyche was traumatized by hearing only half of the Wenkamuy story when he was a child (and guilt over what it caused him to do).  He’s carried that ever since, and it’s what turned him into a killer.

There’s some interesting stuff here around Vasily, who’s almost as skilled with a pencil as he is with a sniper rifle (did we know about that before)?  It’s thanks to “Mister Hood’s” sketch of Heita in one of his other personalities that Shiraishi will know Heita is a tattooed man.  His death works out the best for everyone in that sense – he did engineer it himself after all, but only to free himself of the Wenkamuy curse once and for all in the only possible way he could.

Every little bit (of skin) helps, but again, the main problem for Team Sugimoto has just been deferred for a while.  They’re rather short on allies at the moment – all of them either being dead or converted to enemies as alliances shifted.  Not to mention Ogata is out there too, liable to commit any sort of atrocity at any time just for the lulz, whether it gets him any closer to the gold or not.  I sense there’s some sort of major shakeup to the dynamic coming and very soon, too, but Noda is so unpredictable that I don’t have a clear notion of what it might be.