This season has its big theme for me: flawed gems.  There are a numbers of series balancing good and bad points.  And sure, that happens every season – but this time around I see some starker examples than is typical (perhaps most starkly Mashiro no Oto).  I certainly place Tokyo Revengers in this group, but comparatively speaking I think the key to getting past it is very simple – suspension of disbelief.  That’s a challenge at times (not uncommonly with time travel dramas) but there’s something genuinely likeable about this series, and its default state is quite compelling.  It may have a pretty big flaw, but it’s not pecked to death by a thousand smaller ones.

While there are still elements that annoy me – like totally ignoring the matter of Takemichi’s family – the past timeline is working better for me at this point than the present (which is still working pretty well).  I find Takemichi’s wonderment at lapsing into his old life quite genuine.  He’s falling in love with Hina all over again – remembering what it’s like to fall in love, in fact.  He’s re-discovering loyalty and physical pain and the heightened sense of awareness that’s a part of adolescence.  The experience isn’t entirely pleasant but he’s much more alive here than he was in his adult life, where he was basically half-dead already.

Takemichi’s comment about never having been in a girl’s room probably tells us all we need to know about how his romantic life progressed (which he’s basically admitted anyway).  Chekov’s Dad is name-dropped here – he’s also a cop – suggesting to me that Naoto and Hina’s father is going to be a significant player in events sooner or later.  Hooked on a feeling, that’s Takemichi – when he says he wants to stay in the past forever, I believe him.  But an inadvertent handclasp with Naoto-kun puts an end to that fantasy for the nonce.

Back in the present (well, the more recent past for us) Naoto shows us both sides of his nature.  He scolds Takemichi to make sure he only jumps when he’s around (which seems kind of unnecessary given the mechanism, doesn’t it?) because time passes equally in both timelines and, well- he could starve to death or die of dehydration.  In the next breath he urges Takemichi to kill Mikey, which is profoundly disturbing on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start.  Fortunately Takemichi is clearly not a killer no matter the provocation, but that’s a big red flag as far as Naoto is concerned.

Takemichi’s impulse once back in the present is to talk to Mikey – to try and figure out where it all went wrong.  But Naoto tells him that no one has seen Mikey publicly in years (which makes me wonder if he might actually be dead too).  The break comes with the revelation that yes, Takemichi’s actions are changing events – now Akkun is a top deputy in Toman, rather than a nobody just out of prison for killing Kiyomizu.  Akkun’s old phone number (somewhat improbably) still works, and he’s the obvious conduit to Mikey.

Takemichi is a very naive guy, no question about it.  And the meeting with Akkun (now running a hostess club) quickly turns profoundly dark.  The headline here, of course, is that it was Akkun who pushed Takemichi onto the tracks – no doubt on the orders of Kisaki Tetta, who seems like the sort of guy who’d make a former best friend be the one to kill somebody.  The question of course is why Kiseki would want Takemichi dead – what tipped him off that he was a threat, especially since Akkun’s own suspicions don’t spark until after Naoto happens to be on-hand to save Takemichi?  I suspect sometime in the past Takemichi spilled the beans to the wrong person and it got back to Kisaki, but I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

That suspension of disbelief trigger does get pulled after what happens on the roof, because all I was thinking was “how exactly are Takemichi and Naoto going to be allowed to walk away from this?”  That aside, Takemichi now has someone else to try and save – and then theres Doraken too, who Akkun says is dead and whose death apparently changed Mikey for the worse.  Maybe Takemichi is actually the perfect person to take all this on, because a more cynical (or sensible) guy would probably ask too many questions and never actually act on anything.  That’s not a problem for Takemichi, though he’s certainly got plenty of others to worry about.