I’m in something pretty close to a unique position in my anime experience when it comes to Nomad.  I’m pretty sharply in disagreement with the direction the series is headed, but I’m very much caught up it simply due to the masterful execution.  I won’t say I’m being dragged along against my will, because I want nothing more than to keep loving a series whose first six episodes were the kind of stuff that winds up on “end of decade” lists.  But I am conflicted, to be sure.  Choices are being made here that seem wrong to me, but so far, the end product is only incrementally suffering for it.

If anything, I will say that I feel a little better about things than I did before this week, although the A-part of this episode was arguably the series’ weakest 10 minutes.  I don’t think my concerns are being ignored – they’re very much part of the discussion, in fact.  Where the series comes down on them is an open question, and it does look like a Joe vs. Mac showdown is going to be a climactic (if not the climactic) event in the story.  I only hope we’re not also burdened with Liu being a candidate for a BES chip, because that’s the kind of forced drama Megalo Box 2 just doesn’t need.

This whole corporate intrigue thing with Shirato and ROSCO bores me, quite frankly.  Corporations are evil, boardrooms are stifling, Sakuma is trying to screw everybody and accumulate a fortune.  I get it, it’s not that interesting and it’s a rehash of the first series anyway.  By the end of that series the Shirato siblings had pretty much already been re-cast as good guys so it’s hardly surprising to see them in that role here.  To the extent that all this matters, it’s in the context of Joe’s fight (sigh) with Mac. Obviously somebody has to come to Mac’s rescue before Sakuma and BES can kill him, and I suppose Joe is the one that makes by far the most narrative sense.  The question is how we’re going to get there.

The only moment of that sequence that really clicked for me was when Mikio told his ex-student – there to blackmail him to recant his thesis – “realizing you’ve made a mistake and stopping is moving towards the future too.”  That’s quite profound, actually – the question is, will Joe get there?  This fight with Mac is a bad idea on so many levels.  What is Joe trying to prove, exactly?  I don’t think Sacchio wants him to fight, and Yuri is certainly dead set against it.  Lui does, of course, but he’s young and idealistically stupid, and he has his own agenda.  And all those things are even more true of Santa.

What really bugs me here is that fighting Mac obscures the message that Joe made a mistake fighting Liu in the first place.  The past is the past – it can’t be changed, it can’t be reclaimed.  I think, in the end, Joe is simply a boxer to the core and can’t resist the thrill of one more big challenge.  And of course, while he’d deny it he sees this as a chance to redeem himself for the mistakes he made last time.  The problem is, while Joe lectures Sacchio for blaming himself over what happened, his solution of taking all the blame onto himself isn’t really workable either.

Joe fighting Sacchio was not a development that totally caught me by surprise – I thought they might need to get that out of their system in order to reset their relationship.  What Satch really blames himself for here is his own role in pushing Joe away when, more than anything, he wanted to be by his side.  But he can’t admit that, of course, so he plays the role of the angry young man to the hilt.  Sacchio is lucky – he’s had Fujimaki basically trying to steer him away from the sport, out of a debt he clearly feels he owes to Nanbu.  He’s had Aragaki trying to keep him from getting himself killed.  But Joe is really the only one that can make him give up this misguided path – and he falls back on what he knows in order to do it, beating the crap out of someone.

This fight was the best scene of the episode by far, and one of the best of the series.  It was brutal, it was ruthless – a reminder than Joe for all his bouts of kindness is a hard man who often talks with his fists.  Sacchio should never have pushed Joe away, and Joe never should have let himself be pushed.  They both fucked up, male pride or whatever – but there’s something deeper between them and always has been.  The problem now is Joe.  Is he having some sort of relapse of withdrawal, or a panic reaction from having beaten up Sacchio?  Or is this the onset of CTE (not remotely fictional and a very deadly threat to boxers)?  Whatever is going on, it’s just that much more reason to believe Joe into the ring against Mac Time is a very terrible idea.