If you were looking for something akin to a breather episode, look again.  Golden Kamuy just doesn’t seem to do that sort of thing – the narrative here has a relentless imperative to it that never seems to take a week off.  Yes, the last couple of episodes have been quieter, more emotional and moved more slowly – but they’ve still been jam-packed with event.  In a story this big with a cast this big, and with such deep emotions involved, there just doesn’t seem to be much room (not since the murder castle episode, anyway) for stand-alone.

After that little spell of interior material, though, we pretty much dived right back into batshit this week.  The episode starts with Asirpa gutting a live sunfish napping on the ocean surface, and that’s when it starts to get weird.  Maybe there’s some revenge taking place for all the hunter food porn in this story, but the animal kingdom extracted its fair share of payback here – starting with a swarm of locusts.  On that note – while it’s not story-critical, it struck me as odd that when that biblical event happened and the group was separated, no one thought to check on or even ask about the youngest and most helpless member of the party (Cikapasi) – he just turned up the next morning as if nothing had happened.  Maybe it played out differently in the manga, but that was rather inelegantly done if I’m honest.

The split in the party certainly leads to some interesting consequences.  The four men wind up taking shelter (Sugimoto is afraid of locusts) in a hut, where they set an otter stew to boil.  Meanwhile Asirpa signals Inkarmat to join her in a small boat on the sea, where the locusts apparently won’t follow.  The contrast between these two settings is certainly intense.  Asirpa has correctly deduced that Inkarmat has ulterior motives, but the fortuneteller is a smooth talker and spins a tale of great interest to Asirpa – telling her than Nopperabo is not a father, but a man named Wilk is.  He was a half-Sakhalin Ainu/half-Polish man she came to love, who she says was murdered by Kiroanke.

Meanwhile, otter meat is apparently a powerful aphrodisiac – so powerful in fact that the guys in the hut start to see each other in a wholly different light just from the fumes.  I’d heard a lot about this notorious otter meat episode, but it was pretty over-the-top – especially when Ogata almost lost consciousness (and did lose his pants), Kiroanke arrived unexpectedly, and the sumo started.  What happens in Kushiro stays in Kushiro – that’s the saying, right?  But morning after regret isn’t the end of this little episode – Inkarmat shows up after the others have left Tanigaki sleeping it off, and she proceeds to have her way with him.  “Blame it on the otter” – that’s the old song, right?

Asirpa is not a model of patience, and she confronts Kiroanke about what Inkarmat told her as soon as she sees him the next day.  He denies it of course, even after she produces a betting ticket with his fingerprints on it, which she says places him at the scene of Wilk’s murder.  He also quite correctly accuses Inkarmat of being a tool of Lt. Tsurumi, which she can’t deny – though she claims she was only using him.  This is a bit of an impasse, certainly – not only do Inkarmat and Kiroanke cling to mutually incompatible stories, they disagree about the very identity of Asirpa’s father.  And Shiraishi isn’t able to provide any insight as to Nopperabo’s facial features, though I can’t say I blame him for not wanting to look too closely.

Meanwhile, things are heating up at Abashiri, where a new guard (Matsuoka Yoshitsugu) has taken up his post and shows a keen curiosity about Nopperabo, and his supervisor, Kadokura (Yasuhara Yoshito) cautions him to steer well clear.  But he also tails the new kid, and discovers that he’s actually spying for the 7th – after which the warden orders that he be turned into pig food.  When the spy, even without his katana, proves more than a match for a couple of prisoners with sledgehammers, Kadokura takes advantage of the fact that he flees to tell the warden that he’s actually dead.

There are so many moving parts here that it can be hard to keep up, but the irresistible momentum of this season seems to be leading us towards Sugimoto and Asirpa reaching Abashiri and confronting Nopperabo in-person.  The matter of which man is her true father hangs over this story, as does the possibility that Hijikata has been pulling the strings of both Inkarmat and Kiroanke.  And never afraid his cast has gotten too large, Noda-sensei introduces yet another wild card into the mix – this fellow, played by Mizushima Yuu – apparently a bandit and thus, likely another one of the tattooed convicts.  We don’t know much about him yet, but I think we can assume he’s going to be a freak, a magnificent bastard or both.