Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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Another day, another episode of Sabikui Bisco that is certainly not the best thing airing right now but is pretty damn entertaining. That’s about what I signed up for with Bisco, so I’m pretty satisfied with it.

“Children’s Fortress” splits its time between two stories. Which is an expedient way to keep track of multiple groups of characters at once and also keep the pacing up, but it does make it a tad annoying to summarize. Let’s start with the “B-plot” first, since it’s shorter and simpler.

Pawoo–Sabikui Bisco‘s coolest character and also my future wife–has been pursuing Bisco and Milo since they left Imihama. We don’t get a particularly precise idea of how far off their trail she is so far, but it’s evidently far enough that they don’t interact at all during the course of this episode. Instead, the B-Plot kicks off when Pawoo’s bike pops its tires in the midst of an abandoned town. Evidently from a trap left by some bandits who have themselves long since vacated the area. While trying to sort out what to do about all this, she sees a kindly old couple being menaced by an overgrown mutant spider. This being a shonen anime, she of course casually kills it with her giant iron pole thing and finishes it with a kick. (What is that thing, anyway? No one ever calls it anything but a “pole.”)

^{You really have no idea how hard it is for me to not just caption every single picture of Pawoo with “SHE’S SO COOL!!!!” written exactly like that.}

Grateful, the couple allow her to stay with them while she fixes her bike. They also take the time to explain that an eeeeeeeeevil mushroom keeper is the cause of a Rust outbreak that whittled the town’s population down to just the two of them. Whether or not this is true, we don’t learn here and may never directly learn, but there is reason to doubt the couple’s story.

^{There are many great things about Pawoo, but I would not say that her calm demeanor and even temper are among them.}

Pawoo isn’t with these people for terribly long before she discovers that something is off. By “discovers something is off,” I mean she comes across a bunch of rotting corpses propped up like they’re watching TV in one of the couple’s rooms.

They drop the act pretty much immediately and go all blatantly evil knife-sharpening on her, also threatening to “turn her into a statue of a female oni.”

It’s all rather silly, and of course Pawoo escapes the entire mess unscathed (although I wouldn’t be surprised if the fucking zombie she encounters in the couple’s hideout breathing some kind of toxic fumes on her comes back in some way or another). She doesn’t even actually kill the couple herself. They plea for mercy, but before she can make any meaningful response, retreat back into their hideout, which promptly explodes. Which they seem to have done intentionally? This whole half of the episode is, frankly, kind of absurd. But I do like the idea that whenever Pawoo isn’t directly on-screen she’s off having some kind of bizarre Samurai Jack-ian adventure.

Then there’s the A-plot, which is a tad more involved. In last week’s post-credits teaser, we saw Bisco and Milo come upon a building / small city inhabited solely by children, two of whom were sniping at them from the rooftops. Bisco and Milo end up willingly letting themselves be captured by these kids. Why? Well, mostly because they think they might have food. There’s also perhaps the unspoken implication that even the antiheroic Bisco would prefer to avoid hurting kids if he can.

Mostly this serves as a vehicle for us to learn this town’s woes. All the kids have Rust and all the adults have left town to try to raise money to buy treatments for it. We’re not directly told how long they’ve been gone, but it seems to be a few years minimum, based on the other major threat the town faces; annual giant flying blowfish attacks.

Yes, you read that correctly. Sabikui Bisco really loves its funky bio-engineered deadly wildlife. Here, they even have the audacity to appear out of season due to “unusual weather.” (We are helpfully told that this is normally a winter problem, and it’s currently summer in-show.) Unlike some of the other dangers our heroes have faced, which have been either cool or genuinely grotesque, the blowfish land more on the doofily cute side of the spectrum. But they are dangerous; one of them almost eats support character Kousuke, who spends most of the episode as Bisco’s “jailor.”

It also turns out that, surprise; the infection the kids have is not Rust, but some far more benign and easily treatable disease called shellskin. Milo treats them (and in the process, teaches one of the kids, Plum, enough about medicine that she can become a doctor herself.)

^{Plum also has a precocious crush, which adds her to the long list of women in this show that mistakenly think Milo is available.}

But the facts are simple; their parents have been misled. And by who else but Imihama’s governor? I hadn’t considered this while actually watching the episode, but comparing the two, it makes me wonder if he–or someone working for him–wasn’t the mysterious “mushroom keeper” the couple from the B-Plot were referring to. The man seems to have a vested interest in making sure Imihama is the only habitable place around.

On the other hand; maybe not. Sabikui Bisco is good for what it is, but this is very much an episodic episode. The biggest change here being that Bisco exits town with a new weapon (a harpoon), and some directions pointing him toward an abandoned subway line. It does all feel a touch filler-y, which is a little strange given how short this series is planned to be. Perhaps they’re already banking on a second season, or maybe what’s gone on here will have more significance than I’ve given it credit for.

Still, it’s a minor complaint. Sabikui Bisco‘s goals seem to be fairly modest ones of entertainment and telling a story that’s base-level compelling. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and it’s succeeded at it admirably so far. Will next week bring us more of the same or are things going to start getting a little more ambitious? There’s only one way to find out.

Until then, anime fans.

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