It struck me in watching Sabikui Bisco this week that the experience was familiar, in a very specific way.  I already knew it was a throwback series for sure, but I realized what it really reminds me of – Toonami.  That is, watching anime on Cartoon Network (Toonami, or Adult Swim, whatever incarnation it was at any given moment) on a Saturday at about midnight or so, 15 years ago for good measure.  That was all dubbed of course, but apart from that the experience is eerily similar.  I almost feel in watching Sabikui Bisco as if it’s a series I saw in 2007 and am just catching up with again after a long absence.

Yes, I do enjoy that sensation.  Those were important formative years for me as an anime fan.  I’m not putting this show on a level with Outlaw Star or anything but if you were there, you probably recognize the vibe.  And it delivers some pretty big punches, too.  Last week’s was an intense episode but this one trumped it for sure.  That’s despite taking place entirely inside and outside a dumpy old trailer on the Ishihama frontier, and it’s Kurokawa who really dominates proceedings.

Tsuda Kenjirou is a good actor to be sure, but I think he’s almost comically overexposed at the moment.  He seems to be in just about everything (like Hanae Natsuki, for that matter), and he’s not the sort of seiyuu who disappears into a role.  He’s a persona – he’s being paid to play himself, basically, and that makes his omnipresence that much more glaring.  As such his presence here is interesting because I find myself thinking “yeah, only Tsuda could play this guy” – is that because he’s the right actor, or because we’ve become conditioned to him always being the one playing this guy?

In any event this is Tsuda at his most Kenjirou.  He’s chewing the hell out of the scenery and enjoying it, but to the extent I can be objective I think it’s a style that works very well with this sort of material.  Whether he’s the bad guy in Sabikui Bisco I don’t know (the novels are ongoing), but that he’s a bad guy there can be no doubt.  That TV appearance last week was about what you’d have guessed, Kurokawa torturing Pawoo live in order to blackmail Milo.  The price for her life (which you’d have to be an idiot to expect him to spare either way): Akaboshi Bisco’s head and the secret to the rust eater.

I noted last week that “it seems pretty obvious at this point that his (Kurokawa) agenda is to keep the rust threat hanging over society indefinitely.”  And indeed that was spot-on – it’s monopolizing the treatment for rust victims that keeps the government funded and scum like Kurokawa rich.  As such he needs to have control over any such treatment – and for that matter, curing them altogether is the last thing he wants to do.  Whether it was intended by the author or not, you could hardly have crafted a more pointed condemnation of big pharma than this.

The showdown between Panda and Kurokawa is pretty intense, with crossbow bolts and arrows and sword slashes each drawing blood.  Milo came to the party with tricks up his sleeve but Kurokawa (it was pretty obvious that he was a former mushroom keeper) was ready for them.  His trump card is a mushroom that allows him to exert control over the victim (with just his thoughts, ROFL), which he manages to infect Panda-sensei with.  Bisco shows up and things get really unhinged then – the insults are flying almost as fast as the arrows (and prosthetic limbs), and in the end Bisco is infected with rust after Milo is compelled to shoot him.

Jabi shows up just in time to forestall the worst (after freeing Pawoo), but the decision to let Kurokawa live was just as unwise as it appeared to be in real-time.  Jabi has hoisted so many death flags at this point that I’m stunned he’s still around, but things are looking pretty grim for Milo too.  I can’t imagine he’s gone this early, and Bisco presumably still has the one dose of rust eater he was carrying with him, but this was pretty brutal stuff.  I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this isn’t going to be the final confrontation with Kurokawa.