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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“The Stolen Rust Eater”, Sabikui Bisco‘s seventh episode, is predicated on a fakeout.

At the end of last week’s episode, we were teased a confrontation between Pawoo and Bisco. We were also assured that the giant flying snake creature that Bisco and Milo had been pursuing was the thing they were hunting; the source of the Rust-Eater mushroom and the entire impetus for the quest they’ve been on for the first half of the series. In the opening five or so minutes of “The Stolen Rust Eater,” almost all of this is thrown out the window. Pawoo and Bisco fight only very briefly before uneasily teaming up to rescue Milo from the snake creature. When they take it down, they find that the mushrooms it’s infected with are nothing more than a matsutake. Tasty, maybe, but not at all what they’re looking for.

…Or is it?

You see, it turns out that one needs a mushroom keeper’s blood to “activate” a Rust-Eater mushroom. The Pipe Snake was infected with the right mushrooms. All Milo needs to do to make a cure is carefully harvest some of them and extract some of Bisco’s blood to feed them with. Simple, right? Well, our favorite sinister fedora-wearing governor drops in on a blimp to steal the Pipe Snake’s corpse and shoot Bisco in the stomach with a “rust bullet.” So no, not really.

Things twist and they turn. By episode’s end, Pawoo and Jabi are both hostage to Governor Kurokawa, who informs Milo of this fact via TV broadcast (really). Milo and Bisco have a big scuff-up about which of the two should go it alone to rescue them (obviously they can’t both go. That would just be silly.) While this does adequately convey how much they’ve come to care for each other, it is all rather sudden.

If you’re counting; there are three major twists in this episode’s 23 minutes. Add to that its honestly pretty laughable attempt to pivot Bisco and Pawoo’s adversarial relationship into the latter romantically teasing the former and, well, much as I have enjoyed the series so far, the cracks are starting to show. Some of this is a limitation of format; if you want to adapt X number of manga chapters into Y number of anime episodes, you’re going to have to make some things feel more clipped than others. But it does make me wonder if we really needed a whole episode of Milo learning how to ride Bisco’s giant crab companion, even as fun as that episode was. Everything here feels a bit perfunctory. Even Pawoo and Milo’s big reunion.

Speaking of Pawoo, this episode also pretty handily demonstrates the show’s problems with handling her. Much as I love the character, I wouldn’t actually argue she’s terribly well-written. “Stoic badass” is a pretty simple character archetype. “Doting older sister” is another. “Repeat damsel in distress” is yet a third, and by piling all three on top of each other she is consistently the character that Sabikui Bisco writes the worst. She doesn’t really get to do anything here, and her actions within the episode all feel oddly disconnected from one another. It’s unfortunate. We haven’t even really gotten to properly see her kick ass in a while.

These are all unenviable weaknesses. Sabikui Bisco is consistently at its best the lower the stakes are, but being an adventure anime, we’re now hitting the point of the season where its stakes are getting higher and higher by necessity. I would like to say that I have faith that the show will eventually hit its stride again, but it really just feels too fuzzy to call at the moment. I feel bad saying that, given that I praised the show for its consistency just last week. But things change, and I recap the anime I’m watching in the present, not the anime as it was a week ago. I didn’t dislike the episode, but it feels bizarrely inconsequential for the major role it plays in the story. Looking back, that final line from last week’s column feels like tempting fate.

There is, of course, only one way to really find out for certain if this marks an actual downturn in quality or just a rough patch of road. And to that end, I’ll see you next week, anime fans.

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