Dororo, in addition to being the best anime of the year so far (and the best since the start of 2018, probably), continues to be a fascinating mix of canon and original material.  I’m not sure I can remember too many adaptations that have done this kind of giant slalom narrative format, weaving back and forth between original and source content, and certainly not so seamlessly.  It’s not totally seamless, mind you – while the quality is pretty much consistent there is a subtle tonal difference that tips you off to which you’re watching.

Even not having read the entire manga I’ve been confident about what I was watching after every episode, and not been wrong yet – with only the third (“The Story of Jukai”) being a tough one to puzzle out.  There’s a reason why Furuhashi and Kobayashi have had to do this – Tezuka’s manga is itself a bit of a narrative jumble, full of fits and starts and basically unfinished at that.  But while some of the anime’s original material has felt marginally more episodic, there’s a strong sense that they’re casting a wide net, and that the second cour is going to focus on reeling it in.

I won’t say that Tahoumaru was the last strand of the net to be cast out, but it does strike me that he was the the biggest wild card left un-dealt.  He certainly remains that, but we certainly have a better grasp on him that we did before this episode.  He’s a wild card in the sense that it’s his loyalties that figure to be the most divided among anyone in the cast – his heart most agonizingly pulled in different directions.  And if that’s the case, we needed to learn a little more about what sort of heart it is before we could be fully engaged by his story.

The first thing one notes about Tahoumaru is that whatever happens from this point forward, he’s a victim in all this – or at the very least, he carries no culpability.  He’s the son of a powerful daimyo, obviously a bit imperious by nature, but also seemingly sensitive and bright.  And now, we know, both bold and brave.  Knowing something crucial and probably terrible was being hidden from him Tahoumaru couldn’t sit idly by and do nothing, so with the help of his retainers Mutsu and Hyogo (who seem to be siblings, with Mutsu’s gender being unclear) he gets some information from one of his father’s men – a man who even under the influence of a truth serum was trying to bite off his own tongue rather than reveal it.

Tahoumaru – privileged, resentful over his mother’s lack of love for him and his father’s overprotectiveness – could really have gone either way as a character.  But his reaction upon seeing his father’s men ignoring the pleas of a village under attack from a kaijuu was exactly what you would have hoped to see.  Too brash and confident and a bit reckless, maybe, but you can’t ask more from a lord than to be unwilling to sit idly by as his people beg for help.  His instincts seem to guide him in the right direction, and that may be very important later because he’ll need all the help he can get to stay on the path of light.

The beast in question is a bakemonogani, a monster crab so huge it generates its own whirlpools and sucks down men in boats, boats and all.  Again, I would call the lad’s decision-making a bit reckless here, but that Tahoumaru is courageous certainly can’t be called into doubt.  And I appreciated that he rejected Mutsu’s proposal to have someone pack their body with explosives and allow themselves to be eaten.  The plan he eventually comes up with – using a sluice to strand the crab after luring it into a narrow inlet on the lake – is pretty solid and eventually effective, though things got pretty hairy there for a bit.

What all this is building up to, of course, is Hyakkimaru arriving on the scene – which I was expecting but not totally convinced was going to happen.  Whether this youkai was one of Hyakkimaru’s demons I don’t know (he didn’t visibly get any body part returned to him), but attack he did when he saw the boatmen in trouble.  As of now Hyakkimaru is only a mysterious stranger as far as Tahoumaru is concerned – he hasn’t connected the dots yet.  But Daigo is getting ever closer to the truth, and Tahoumaru will certainly learn it soon enough.

We pretty much know what Daigo wants – but what will Tahoumaru do when that moment comes?  Will his loyalty to his father trump his essential nature, which seems to favor decency?  The boy we’re shown here would certainly be horrified to know what his father had done to achieve his power and wealth, but his sense of duty to his lord and father is clearly a powerful motivator for Tahoumaru.  It may be a while before he’s forced to make that decision, but the time will come – and what he’ll decide is one of the biggest mysteries of Dororo.