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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I will say one straightforward, positive thing about “Tetsujin Revived” before we get into the ups and downs of the episode in more detail. It opens with one hell of a little plot detour. Remember the Ganesha Cannon? The bio-engineered elephant nuclear missile launcher from last episode? Well, Sabikui Bisco opens this week by making it seem like the thing’s going to fire anyway, despite Kurokawa’s timely demise. Instead, Pawoo, in what is provably her most substantial contribution to the plot thus far, throws one of the giant cyborg gorillas at it and knocks it over, disabling it.

^{God, I wish that was me.}

Now, does this cause its reactor to go critical and almost kill a bunch of people? Yes. But that’s fine, Pawoo is a knucklehead who thinks with her fists. She’s allowed to make mistakes like that, I’m just over the moon that she actually got to do something important for once. The show does not really use Pawoo that well, and even this little moment is over way too soon (and she’s conspicuously absent from what follows). But still, it’s something.

It’s been clear to me for a while that, in general, what I like about Sabikui Bisco is different from what it actually wants to focus on. And true enough, the moments of sentimentality and stabs at subtler character shading that the show attempts here largely don’t work. I’m repeating myself at this point, but they mostly come across as unintentionally humorous.

But that doesn’t mean that Bisco is a lost cause. Even with one of its leads dead (frankly, the less interesting one), there is still space to make a compelling cartoon, here. And when all the commotion from the fight at Kurokawa’s facility reawakens one of the Tetsujin giants, Bisco suddenly feels far more coherent than it has in a long time.

^{Attack on blightin’}

The Tetsujin here is a creature in a long tradition of weird nuke allegory-ish giant monsters from anime and manga. It kinda rules despite being pretty ugly. It’s hastily established that the Japanese government (remember them?) can’t reasonably fight the thing off, what with its arsenal of poisonous Rust clouds, laser vision, self-healing screams (?!), and sheer size. But Milo might be able to, because he was given the full Rust-Eater injection and is probably immune to Rust.

So, there you go, our last arc is set up; Milo sets off to defeat the Tetsujin with Jabi and Pawoo at his back, supporting however they can. Somewhere in here, the show unsubtly hints, and then confirms, that Kurokawa’s consciousness is somehow merged with the Tetsujin (villains like him rarely stay dead on the first try, though I must admit that I didn’t see this particular twist coming.)

There is a wrinkle in all this. Remember Tirol?

^{You know, the pink one.}

She was introduced near the start of the series, and last appeared in episode six, in what was, in hindsight, the show’s last unambiguously good episode. (That first paragraph reads like stage irony four weeks later, but what can you do.) Here, she’s wandering around some town, only to be caught up in the tide of soldiers fleeing in the Tetsujin’s wake. This has the effect of very quickly cementing just how serious the whole situation is and provides a nice inroad for her to link up with the rest of the cast, later.

The episode climaxes, of course, with a fight between Milo and the Tetsujin. Only, it’s really more like another fight between Bisco and Kurokawa. Milo begins acting strangely too, claiming to be Bisco. Whether this is some genuine supernatural / sci-fi stuff going on, Milo developing an Anime Split Personality, or something else entirely has yet to be spelled out. Maybe it never will be, who knows.

Regardless, the fight is pretty great. What it lacks in truly spectacular animation it makes up for with great staging; everything feels appropriately huge and sweeping as Milo pelts the Kurokawa-Tetsujin with mushroom arrows. The nomadic astronaut-helmeted people from episode six get in on the action, too, acting as fire support (and narrowly dodging being annihilated by the Tetsujin’s laser eye.)

When the episode ends and it somehow heals itself, only to unleash another massive Rust blast, there is a real sense that the fate of Japan hangs in the balance. That’s a good thing, and those are the kinds of stakes Sabikui Bisco can afford to raise. It’s totally possible it’ll faceplant again sometime over its final two episodes, but this is the best the series has been in some time, and for now, that’s good enough.

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