If I were to apply one word to this episode of Appare-Ranman! it would be “conventional”. The execution was perfectly fine, but every development was straight off the rack. The rack might now always be the anime one, but it’s standard issue just the same. What’s kind of a shame is that the series has more or less abandoned the elements that made it a little more interesting than usual to start with in favor of the conventional developments. I won’t say that’s unexpected but it’s nevertheless a little disappointing.
Yes, I do think a series about a transcontinental auto race and Japanese culture shock in turn-of-the-century America would have been more interesting that a pastiche of ramen westerns and Sengoku dramas. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anime do the former but I’ve certainly seen it do the latter. All the pieces on the board turn this last arc into checkers more than chess. Gil is suitably vicious but he’s too one-dimensional to be a king, and his underlings are certainly too flat to even be pawns.
This ep finds the remaining racers teaming up as a group of ten (yes, that includes you-know-who) to try and rescue the hostages. It’s basically the Sanada Ten Braves placed inside The Magnificent Seven, and it follows the pattern you’d more or less expect. There are a couple of interesting twists, like Chase showing off a little ingenuity and generally being more of a driving force than you’d have expected him to be. But basically it’s the good guys taking out a bunch of zaku, pairing off in Kenshin-in-Kyoto style battles against the main henchmen, and finally reuniting for the final facedown with Gil.
One thing all this does is call to mind just how well something like this has to be executed in order to be genuinely compelling. There’s nothing wrong with any of it as it plays out here, but it’s flat as those checker pieces. Even Kosame’s wound reopening has little impact, because it was an inevitable cliche in the circumstances. And since he’s the most engaging person in the cast that’s kind of a depressing statement. I suppose we will get a bit of the race at the very end (with Appare likely winning it) but that will feel like a climax with the “anti” squarely placed in front of it.
