It’s a funny thing about Tokyo Revengers.  It’s unquestionably a kaiju, one of the most popular media franchises from Japan.  It placed second in manga sales in 2022, and not all that far behind JJK either (and beating the likes of Spy x Family and One Piece).  But I never seem to hear from anybody who’s a big fan.  Casual viewers and readers, sure – but someone who’s a die-hard, like with those other franchises?  Not in the circles I intersect with, anyway.

As for me, I’ve drifted through two seasons of TMR and generally gotten less engaged as time passed.  There’s just so much head-desk stuff here, and at some point you get weary of characters doing dumb things with no indication the writing agrees they’re dumb.  And with stuff happening which just makes no sense.  It’s pretty much shit or get off the pot time for this show with me – Tenjiku-hen is going to have to prove itself a measurable step up from Seiya Kessen-hen or I’m going to cut my losses.  I feel no particular obligation to finish this adaptation just for the sake of doing it.

This was a pretty decent first episode, though generally speaking Tokyo Revengers tends to start off better than it finishes.  It picks up more or less in the immediate aftermath of Seiya Kessen-hen, with Kisaki having just showed his hand and Takemitchy and his crew getting their asses handed to then.  They’re eventually saved by the Kawata brothers – yes, they’re twins and Takemitchy seems to be the only one in Toman who didn’t know that.  They run over people with their bikes as if it were nothing – you know, people die when you do that but apparently we’re not going to worry about that.

I thought dim bulb Takemitchy had one of his brighter moments when he mused that maybe it was Kisaki being in Toman to do the dirty work that spared Mikey from going full sociopath.  So naturally Wakui blows that idea out of the water pretty much immediately.  No, the problem isn’t that (Mikey is too pure), but – Takemitchy muses – that Kisaki too has the ability to go back into the past, and it systematically foiling his ventures with his own interference.  The fact that Kisaki died in the future calls into question whether he still has the option of returning to it, but this is the early-season McGuffin as far as the plot is concerned.

So we have a full-on gang war brewing between Toman and Tenjiku, broadly seeded with Toman traitors.  Kisaki is working as the staff officer to Tenjiku’s head, Kurokawa Izana (who we only meet briefly under the closing credits).  There’s a brief survey introduction of Tenjiku’s four chief badasses, one of whom is a childhood friend of Takemitchy, Kakucho (Kaku-chan).  That spares he, Chifuyu, and the Kawata twins from being pulped by a hundred Tenjiku guys when they drop in at their HQ for some reason, but Kaku-chan isn’t willing to go so far as to officially help his old friend.  He does tell Takemitchy the way to get to Kisaki, and warns her to beware of traitors – though I would say that one is rather closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.

This is all broadly entertaining in the way Tokyo Revengers can be if you don’t think about it too much.  Perhaps one of the reasons it always seems to lose steam over the course of a season is that it becomes harder and harder not to think about what you’re watching as the episodes progress.  It’s when it has to do substance that TMR really struggles, and that of course will be the acid test with Tenjiku-hen.  I can’t say past history gives me a strong sense of optimism about that, but there is a definite likability factor to this series so I am prepared to be won over.