Last week’e episode of Odd Taxi was both outstanding and a seeming outlier.  So the question of how it might follow it up here was an interesting one on multiple levels.  One thing I’m sure of – this show gets less surreal with each passing episode, which makes me wonder if something eventually has to give with regards the elephant in the room.  Odd Taxi doesn’t seem like the sort of series that takes the “that’s just how it is” approach, so presumably we’re going to get some sort of explanation sooner or later.  But who knows?

The plot here is growing increasingly more Byzantine with each passing week, and you sense that there are no coincidences.  No one’s appearance seems to be random, no matter how random it may have seemed at first.  That’s impressive, and it give you the idea that a rewatch of this show would be a very revealing experience.  But it does make it hard to keep all the threads straight at times, at least for me.  The idol trio Mystery Kiss – and their manager Yamamoto, a key player this week – seem to tie a lot of these disparate elements together.  To wit:

• Dobu’s rival, Yano, is connected with them.
• Yamamoto is very interested in Odokawa’s dash cam footage, which makes him a person of interest to Dobu and likely means the idols are directly connected to the missing girl case (I’m still assuming it’s one of them).
• If indeed one of the trio is the missing girl, she’s also Dobu’s boss’ daughter.
• One of the idols, Shiho, apparently hooks up electronically with “old dudes” online as part of her job in promoting Mystery Kiss.  Kaikhara just happens to be her unlucky current victim, though of course he’s scamming her too.

Meanwhile we continue to get snatches of eerily realistic if quirky conversation – like the idol Mitsuya riffing on karaage and soul food.  And Yamamoto’s running dialogue about his work is creepy for how mundane it sounds, given how unsavory it all is.  Having already skewered the gacha game industry Odd Taxi is taking aim at the idol trade, clearly, and a more deserving target one could hardly imagine.  Yamamoto’s affable paternalism towards his human (effectively) commodities is actually probably on the idealistic side when compared to the real world.

Apart from that, everyone connected to Odakawa is getting deeper and deeper into trouble.  Kakihara is taking out high-interest loans to pay for his hopeless charade of a courtship of Shiho.  Shirakawa is stealing Goriki’s medications and selling them to Dobu – though Dobu swears he didn’t prompt her to approach Odokawa.  And Goriki is planning to close his clinic rather than face the music over what happened, leaving him plainly very worried about Odokawa (note that he served him warm milk for their late night “consultation”).  And Kabasawa openly taunting a mobster may have gotten him the viral status he craved, but it’s impossible to count the number on levels on which that’s a stupid thing to do.

What we’re left with is a fascinating contradiction – a show about talking animals that’s one of the most grounded and realistic anime we’ve seen in years.  How Odd Taxi reconciles that is going to be one of the most fascinating things to follow as it starts to tie the threads together.  I get the feeling the series has a big trump card left to play where that’s concerned – it just seems like that sort of show.  But since we hardly ever get whatever sort of show it actually is, predicting its course is probably a pretty foolhardy undertaking.