Hotel Inhumans – 02

There are just too damn many shows this season. I’ve known that since the preview. And the Sunday/Monday Enzo time period is especially ridiculous. The first two episodes of Hotel Inhumans have been quite good, but it’s facing long odds to carve out a spot on the schedule.

I’m of two minds on the narrative device with the orchestra this week. It was interesting, but possibly a bit overused. As for the story we got a bit more focus on the concierges this time, especially Ikurou. He’s not exactly in love with his job, and I can’t really blame him. One has to assume the pay is damn good, though. The guest this time is an assassin named Kase-san, who fancies himself as the conductor orchestrating the perfect kill (thus the device). He’s a master of disguise, taking the face of his target. This has some practical value – momentarily freezing them in shock, fooling security cameras – though one suspects he does it in part because he enjoys it.

The hook with Kase is that he can “read” everyone but his wife. But she can certainly read him. She spots him on the street while he’s wearing the face of a drug dealer he’s just offed from his gait (which Sarah has earlier Chekov’d). Ironically, just after this encounter – probably because he was distracted – Kase himself is stabbed by the father of one of the dealer’s customers. It’s a rather poetical way for a hitman to go out – and it segues into an exploration of the hotel’s special “dying” service. All this continues to be fairly engaging and well-executed (no pun intended) so the plan is to keep watching for now. We’ll see on the coverage side.

Nyaight of the Living Cat – 02

I guess in the final analysis one has to look at Nyaight of the Living Cat primarily as a comedy. That doesn’t sound like much of a bold statement but I mean, it is going for a sort of fusion of genres. But it’s incredibly silly and clearly spends more time winking at the audience than not.

Without a doubt the thing that made me ROFL the hardest here was the SDF forces putting out… water bottles to hold back the horde of cats. Because you see that all over Japan – I would swear 50% of homeowners put those damn bottles out. And the joke is, they never work. Cats totally ignore them because, why wouldn’t they? No one even seems to know why it’s supposed to work, but they keep doing it anyway. And continuing to do something despite not knowing the reason why and it not working is as Japanese as anything could possibly be.

Nyaight obviously was making that very joke, as the cats strolled right through the bottles (and the spike mats). Tanishi crashed his car rather than run over cats (even in this situation I would too) but fortunately the trio managed to find refuge in a supermarket where Kaoru’s friend Tsutsumi works. Tsutsumi is heavily cat allergic (that’s a Chekov’s gun if ever there was one – canary in a coal mine, anyone?) and frankly dumb as a post. The other hilarious bit in the episode was Tsutsumi and Kaoru helping save Tetsuo the cat from a tree. Neither of them had any clue how to climb it, and every time he was on-screen a “TETSUO” with arrows caption popped up.

The other thing that makes me ROFL is, why are like 80% of this cast weird-looking dudes? Some look like refugees from a 70’s rock band (I swear I saw Freddie and Brian, and Tanishi could have been a Village Person) ans others are just generally sus. Kanagi enjoying playing with the cats in a life-and-death situation was a highlight too – I totally feel that. It’s an “if you get it you get it” sort of show but I’m laughing, and the cat tropes are on-point, so all signs still point to yes here.