For me, there’s no question Youko is the scariest person in this series. Akira being as impassive as he is given what he does for a living is certainly more unnerving in an intellectual sense. But he’s so disarmingly unthreatening that unless you really stop and think about it he just doesn’t scare you. Youko, OTOH, is a pure, calculating queen of torture. She has an incredibly mean streak and she’s addicted to indulging it. She says it herself – “I can’t help it, I’ve got nothing to do”. It’s exactly what I said a good two months ago – “Maybe the most dangerous thing in Osaka is a bored Youko”.

In thinking about it The Fable is kind of what would happen if King of the Hill and The Coen Brothers had a love child. And this episode may have epitomized that more than any other. It neatly played out on two fronts, with Akira and Kuro’s mountain adventure reaching its climax while Youko finally moved in for the kill with Kawai-kun. The final touch was the bartender providing Howard Cosell-like color commentary and play-by-play as Youko stepped into the ring against the “Muhammed Ali of Bar Buffalo”.

Akira decides to harvest the venom from the captured mamushi in order to teach Kuma-san a lesson. And I learned that eating viper meat gives you a woody (at least on this show it does). Akira is very focused on making sure the bear learns to fear humans, and you wonder who in his mind’s eye he’s concerned with providing a service to – humans, or the bear (I suspect the latter). Naturally he’s totally unfazed at the idea of facing down the bear, even as Kuro struggles to suppress his terror. “We’ll teach it a lesson in six seconds”, Akira says reassuringly.

Meanwhile Kawai hatches a strategy with the bartender, which the latter realizes is completely irrelevant to what will happen. Master could have warned Kawai off here – he certainly knows what Youko is. The fact that he didn’t is interesting – he has a sense of humor, clearly. He also betrays Kawai by putting just as much vodka in his “lady killer” as he does in Youko’s. From them things progress quickly to tequila, with predictable results (I find tequila kicks your ass unlike any other liquor of comparable strength). I must protest, though, that a lemon with tequila shots is just plain wrong. It has be a lime – no exceptions (lemon margaritas are another matter).

Twenty shots later and Kawai is sufficiently biffle-dinked to satisfy Youko – it’s a TKO. I question whether anybody, much less a person who weighs about 115 pounds, could be as seemingly unaffected by liquor as Youko. Be that as it may, she’s gotten Kawai so tanked that his health is in genuine jeopardy, which seems not to detract from her glee one iota. It’s interesting to speculate – did this work too well? Would Youko have had more fun if she’d ended the fight earlier, with Kawai still coherent enough to go home with her? And does she ever actually bed any of her victims (or anyone else, for that matter)?

Akira vs. the bear is almost as big a mismatch, though Kuro gets a hell of a scare out of the encounter before Akira puts an end to it. In the aftermath he’s totally calm, only ruffled that he couldn’t recover Kuro’s dagger and worried that he injured the bear too badly. Just what did Akira and Kuro take away from this encounter? Is Akira respectful in any way of Kuro for getting through those three days? Kuro’s worship of Akira is enhanced, if anything. If he wasn’t going to take no for an answer before, it’s hard to see him feeling any different now.