The nature of a tragedy, in dramatic terms, is such that there’s little or no suspense as to what’s going to happen.  The emotional weight for the audience comes not from wondering how things will play out but from knowing and being helpless to do anything to change it.  It’s not a form that’s enormously popular in modern fiction (though it’s certainly never died out), but in the realm of boxing works it’s always been a staple and still is.  There’s something in the nature of sports in general and boxing in particular that seems to lend itself to the tragic form.

That brings us to Megalo Box – and while I don’t think you’ll find the word “tragedy” in any of the official marketing genre tags, it’s a label the show seems to wear pretty openly on its sleeve.  One might accuse it of being a little too obvious with the episode titles, but really – has there ever been any doubt about where this story was headed?  Would there have been, even if Megalo Box wasn’t the scion of Ashita no Joe?  The two series share a kinship that runs deeper than simply being part of the same franchise.

For me at least, even knowing that Nanbu-san was going to betray Joe in the end didn’t deaden the impact when it finally happened.  He was probably telling the truth when he told Joe he actually started to believe in him after a while, and I’ve no doubt that he’d love to be able to let Joe fight for his dreams and stand or fall on his own merits.  But Nanbu sold his soul to the devil a long time ago.  The famous parable Fujimaki refers to not once in this episode is apt, but one wonders – is the scorpion in the story Nanbu, or is it Fujimaki himself?  Or is it perhaps both of them, each riding the back of a different frog across the river?

Again, there’s no suspense as to what the outcome of the semi-final between Yuri and Pepe Iglesias is going to be – if Yuri doesn’t win, we basically have no finale.  Still, it’s a pretty interesting fight – and it doesn’t hurt that TMS appears to have gotten a native Spanish-speaker to play Pepe (the same can’t be said for Burroughs and English, though the Japanese actor isn’t half-bad).  Yuri is a straight-up badass, gear or no gear – but I sure would like to see him take on Joe without it.  And developments in this episode give a slight boost to the narrow hope I’ve been holding out that it might actually happen.

Those developments come mostly in the backstory (finally) for Sachio.  Sachio is very much in the crosshairs, just like Joe and Nanbu – Fujimaki has made it clear he’ll exact his payback against the boy if Joe refuses to throw his fight with Burroughs.  Nanbu has done some research (playing a hunch he picked up after the meeting with the deposed Shirato engineer), and has discovered the truth – Sachio’s father was a freelance engineer who perfected the integrated gear Yuri wears.  And Shirato apparently stole his design and for good measure killed him off, presumably to ensure his silence.  All this seems to have happened before Yukiko took over the company.

The implications here are pretty far-reaching, especially given the conversation Yuri and Joe have at the close of the episode.  Once Yuri learns the truth behind his gear – a truth that Yukiko now knows, thanks to Nanbu – will that change the way he feels about wearing it in the ring?  Nanbu has brought Sachio to Yukiko to try and shield him from Fujimaki, which suggests he’s either decided to let Joe fight to win or acknowledged that he couldn’t stop him anyway.  I don’t think it’s a certainty yet, but I’d like to believe there’s enough basic decency in Yukiko to recognize that she owes a debt to Sachio after what her company did to him.  That’s what Nanbu is counting on, anyway.