Time to dust off those old Megalo Box write-ups…

No question, this episode of Nomad was a shift in…  Well – a shift in everything.  Tone, certainly, and substance too.  I think it would be fair to say that this was the first ep of Megalo Box 2 that distinctly felt like the same show as the first season.  Which is great and all, as that was my top series of 2018.  But the truth is that I’ve liked Nomad even better up to this point, and I’m not sure this trip down memory lane is going to prove a net positive for me.  But that’s for the next few weeks to prove out, I suppose.

With this episode, it’s pretty much all present and accounted for as far as the S1 cast is concerned.  And some more new faces too, most prominently among them Mac Rosario (Miyaushi Atsushi in a rare recent appearance).  He’s the guy fighting Liu in the next championship bout, and he comes with a full backstory.  Former wildman megaloboxer turned cop, became a folk hero after he was shot during a gang war (in the act of saving a kid).  That shooting left him paralyzed for life, boxing the furthest thing from his mind.

Enter ROSCO, a tech company founded by the genius young entrepreneur Sakuma Ryugo (Kobayashi Chikahiro).  He’s invented a chip called BES which he implants in Mac’s brain and through scientific genius stuff enables him to regain movement.  Eventually Mac regains so much movement that Sakuma suggests he try megalo boxing again, and the rest is history.  Mac works his way up the ladder to earn a title fight against Liu, and he’s got Shirato Yukiko and her empire in his corner (even her brother shows up for as yet unknown reasons).

This is all pretty heartwarming stuff, but it seems to good to be true.  Mac is too perfect as a Cinderella story, Sakuma is way too nice for a billionaire, and anything Shirato in involved in rings alarm bells for shadiness. For his part, as implied by earlier flashbacks Liu seems like a pretty decent kid on the whole.  He’s obsessed with Joe, for the very good reason that he knows the Joe he fought was a shell of the man who brought down his trainer, Yuuri.  Santa intervenes, smelling a good story, and tips Liu off that Joe is back in town.  Against Yuuri’s wishes. Liu hires Joe to be his sparring partner with a promise that he’ll fight him right for reals after he finishes off Mac.

This Liu-Joe angle is the best part of the episode by far.  Liu’s thinking is entirely understandable here – he’s fighting two ghosts, Yuuri’s and Gearless Joe’s, and he’ll never be recognized as his own man until he exorcises them.  He can never do that with Yuuri, and it seems naive to think that Joe could ever return to the fighter he was.  But if nothing else sparring with Joe might give Liu a little internal peace, and indeed their first session – surreptitiously witnessed by Santa and Bonjiri – is a humdinger.  Joe may be old and rusty but once he’s in the ring with a fighter of Liu’s caliber the fire returns to his eyes – and his fists.  Joe throwing off his gear and Liu doing the same is the most rousing moment of Nomad so far, no question about it.

So it’s all good, mostly.  I’m just worried things are going to revert to the form of the first season, and that would feel like a bit of a betrayal of the themes Nomad established in its first six episodes.  Great pains were gone to in order to convince us that Joe no longer exists, nor does the world he left behind.  Nomad has been a story of diminished expectations and grim realities, compromises with the passage of time because it leaves us no choice but to do so.  As great as Megalo Box was, Nomad was a story of what comes after the stadium lights are dimmed – and it was all the more emotionally powerful because of that.  It’s earned my trust and then some, and I’m anxious to see where it goes.  But there’s an edge to that anxiousness that hasn’t been there up to this point.