I’ve been saying for a long time that Walter is the stealth bomber of Shinigami Bocchan. I think he has the most significant character arc in the cast, for starters, with the most interesting evolution. He’s also part of what’s actually IMO the best romance in a series that’s full of them. The rest of the cast is likable and funny, for the most part, but Walter is the one who has the most going on as a character. And this was the episode where that really started to come to the forefront.
There was no insert song this week for what feels like the first time this season (but probably isn’t), but we did get another storybook dream sequence. This time around it was “Little Red Riding Hood“, featuring a very amusing cameo by Miyake Kenta as the wolf. There was also an awful lot of really nice piano background music by Watanabe Takeshi, a frequent occurrence with this series that I don’t talk about enough. The piano is an important part of The Duke of Death and his Black Maid, often setting the mood as it did here.
As we’ve frequently seen this season, a fluffy intro is followed by the much meatier main event. Walter is at the heart of it, and we get more insight than ever into just why – and how much – his status as the spare brother rankles him. Is it a complex? Absolutely. But it’s understandable, especially given that his brother was clearly much more at ease with people (which makes his fate somewhat ironic). Walter may be neurotic and tetchy, but his approach here befits the sort of guy he actually is. He’ll get his revenge by solving his brother’s curse problem for him, thus proving his own superiority in the process.
My suspicion is that Walter knows, deep down, that the end result of his fixing Bocchan’s curse would, in fact, be Bocchan’s return to a welcoming family and inheritance. But that’s not going to stop him, and he’s learned (presumably that cameo in town last week was his visit to the “shady merchant”), if he wears a special robe and touches a mirror on the night of the blood moon, he can cross over to the witches’ world and attend their Sabbath. Alice has the same idea – her means is a magic-imbued stone she got from Caph, and her intent is to confront Daleth about that tease involving Sharon.
Naturally, everyone is surprised to see who’s turned up at Sabbath. Bocchan decides to lead the angry mob away from Walter and Alice, who have their first real conversation of the series. Alice sees though Walter’s tsun act to the dere lad underneath, even if her constant comparison of the brother pushes all his hot buttons. Alice has her pendant (with a photo of her mother) stolen by a goofy little witch (another amusing cameo, this time Fukushima Jun), and Walter puts himself in charge of getting it back. Which he does, thanks to his natural empathy – a theme we’ll see play out once more when Walter sneaks into Daleth’s church (where she’s hiding because of her embarrassment at having her face exposed).
In Shinigami Bocchan terms, this definitely amounts to a fated meeting. Walter is tsundere towards the whole universe, basically, but in the end he always wants to help. He understands Daleth on a visceral level, something she’s clearly not at all used to, and there are enough sparks here to populate a town in Nevada. The threads connecting the major players in the story is growing ever-more tangled, to the point where pulling on one can be felt in all the others, like a spider’s web.
