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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We open last week’s episode of Oshi no Ko on a smiling face and some cold, hard numbers. Ruby is applying to join an existing idol group as an add-on member. Her chances are literally one in hundreds of thousands, but nonetheless she swings into the episode’s opening moments in a whirl of joy and determination. Ruby is easily the more upbeat of our two leads (which is probably why, sadly, she’s the one who tends to get less screentime), and these first couple minutes are a cheerful pastiche of the past decade and change of idol anime. Juxtaposed, of course, with a reminder of the grim fate of Ruby’s mother / oshi in a past life / it’s complicated, Ai. A few of her friends at school razz her over the fact that she can’t sing, as though that’s ever been an obstacle to being a star anywhere in the world.

More pertinent are her brother Aqua’s objections. Idols, he points out as though Ruby doesn’t already know, make relatively little money, live under constant scrutiny, and are mostly pushed out of their line of work by their early 30s. Ruby does know all this, of course. But in a little exchange that cuts to the heart of why people do this stuff in the first place, she asks Aqua what his point even is. People do not chase the kind of dream Ruby’s chasing because they want to be rich or because they want job security. The dream is, itself, the point, for better or worse. This is something Oshi no Ko comes back to, underscoring and undercutting it in equal measure, throughout its whole story as part of its larger themes.

Something else that recurs not just throughout Oshi no Ko but throughout Aka Akasaka’s work in general is that simply wanting something badly enough does not make it happen. Ruby eventually gets the phone call responding to her audition, and is flatly rejected. She’s comforted by Miyako [Lynn], who is now serving as the twins’ mother figure as she runs the revamped Strawberry Productions by herself (they manage net talent these days, we’re told), but the comfort is a cold one. And as it turns out, Ruby hasn’t really been rejected on the basis of her own abilities in the first place. The person on the other end of the phone was actually Aquamarine, who, we learn, has been going through incredible lengths to keep his sister out of the industry. Being so deceptive about it is pretty shitty (to the point where the phone call “from the idol agency” was actually Aquamarine himself, he’s got quite the vocal range), but one does, in an abstract sense, understand his trepidations. You’d be paranoid about the whole thing too if your mother was stabbed to death by a stalker. Still, he’s clearly going about this entirely the wrong way, and this is absolutely going to come back to bite him somehow.

None of it ends up mattering; Ruby is promptly scouted for a different group—this one an indie—just days later.

Miyako and Aqua are rightly concerned that this might be a sketchy situation (which would not be a first for an underground idol group), and Aqua handles it in a rather unscrupulous way yet again, pretending to scout one of their idols and, with a little effort and a false promise of possibly hiring her himself, manages to squeeze all kinds of reasons to not let Ruby join out of her. (Incidentally, this character, Lala, is pretty cute, but I don’t think we ever see her again, unless I’m forgetting something.)

In the end, Ruby does sign with an agency; Strawberry themselves, who, under Miyako’s guidance, are putting together a new group for the first time in a decade. Both she and Aqua reason that if Ruby is really going to insist on this, it’s better for her to be managed close to home. In a different sort of show, this would be where things pivot back into a heart-pounding underdogs-race-to-the-top narrative, akin to something like The Idolmaster or last year’s surprisingly great Shine Post. But that is not what Oshi no Ko is, and that’s not where our story (or even the episode) ends.

Aqua has been helping the Director out as an editor and general assistant since his mother passed away, but when the Director approaches him (not for the first time) about becoming an actor as well, Aqua brushes him off, saying that he doesn’t have any true talent and doesn’t have what his mother did. This leads into the only real miss of episode 2, a gag where the Director keeps trying to give an inspirational monologue but is interrupted by his mom barging into his room. This is decently funny, almost Simpsons-y, the first time it happens, but it happens several times before the scene is over, and by the end it just feels vaguely meanspirited. (Which is also pretty Simpsons-y, now that I think of it.) It’s easy to miss that despite being interrupted, the Director’s speech is actually a pretty good one. He touches on how Aqua, who’s only a teenager, is way too young to be giving up on his dreams and clearly wants to be an actor. Aqua is so focused on finding his mother’s killer that he may be blind to his own love of the craft, which is pretty tragic in its own way and explains no small amount about his character.

Episode 2 ends with a fun little diversion. Aqua and Ruby enter the integrated middle / high school where Ruby will be getting her performing arts education. Here, we’re reintroduced to Kana, who Aqua doesn’t initially recognize. She gets the last line of the episode; initially relieved that Aqua’s returned to acting (crush much?), she flips out when Aqua tells her that he’s actually taking the general education track. Cut to credits!

All told, despite a few minor missteps, episode 2 is an essential bit of scaffolding, establishing both Ruby and Aqua’s respective personalities and motivations and their (rather lopsided) relationship with each other. I imagine Aqua’s serious, manipulative characterization might lose some people, and I’ll admit that the already-great series might be even better if we perhaps swapped the personalities around here, but really, these are petty complaints at best. And we’re not even done! Since my life has been in a bit of a shamble lately, I didn’t get to cover episode 2 last week, which means we’ve got two to talk about this week. Cut to (opening) credits!

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We pick up right where we left off, with Aqua and Ruby meeting Kana again for the first time. Initially, they essentially lightly bully her, which gives us a feast of Good Kana Faces to kick off the episode with.

This quickly take a somewhat more serious turn, though, and it becomes clear that while the previous episode focused mostly on Ruby with an Aqua segment in its last third, this one is going to be Aqua’s show. (Ironic, given how much of the episode he spends still denying that he wants to act.)

We should talk about Kana first, though. This is our first real look at her post-her child actress era, and while her star has dimmed, it hasn’t gone out. She’s happy to leverage the fact that she’s the lead role in the fictional shoujo manga drama web-miniseries adaptation Sweet Today to attempt to get Aqua back in the game. (If Sweet Today sounds familiar, that’s because it also shows up in Kaguya-sama: Love is War. This and a few other connections make it clear that the two series take place in the same universe. Is this relevant to anything at all in either of them? Not to my knowledge, but it’s a fun fact.) Kana herself spends much of this early part of the episode bouncing around the screen and just generally being lively and engaging. I realize I’ve really hammered this point home over the last two columns, but this kind of charisma is deadly important if you’re trying to sell a character as a performer, and Kana is yet another Oshi no Ko cast member who has it in spades. (For that matter, Aqua does too, although his is more of a cold and dark kind of compelling. If he were a real person, I imagine he’d have quite the fandom over on tumblr.)

Aqua’s not interested until he hears the name of the drama’s producer, Masaya Kaburagi. As for why, we here swerve over to the show’s darker side once again. We learn that in his search for Ai’s killer, Aqua’s compiled a list of candidates. How? Well, he found his late mother’s secret personal phone, and spent four entire years trying to guess the correct passcode. (He’s lucky it only used numbers, frankly.) That gave him a list with a good dozen industry people on it. Masaya Kaburagi was one of them.

This in mind, he accepts Kana’s offer. Although because Kana happened to have just mentioned that the male lead in the production was attractive, she suddenly gets the wrong idea. (To be honest, the fact that she cares, even in a girlish “ohmigosh” sort of way, slightly bugs me. It’s not like Aqua would be the first gay actor in the world, and Kana’s been in the industry since she was a child.)

We actually get to see a minute or two of Sweet Today, and it is truly dire, with canned, wooden acting from not only Kana herself but also her co-lead. On Kana’s part, she’s deliberately acting well below her level, since most of her co-stars are male models, not actors, and without someone with equivalent chops to play off of, she risks barreling over the rest of the cast if they can’t keep up. Thus, she tries to act the same way they are, and hopes to at least present the series as “watchable”, if not great. She points out that acting well and making a good show are different things, and we get the point again here of acting being primarily about communication. This is a lesson she had to learn the hard way; the reason her roles dried up as she got older was that she was initially so difficult to work with. Things are different now, and she makes a point of being a good coworker.

All this said, Sweet Today‘s production is still a disaster. The main reason Kana wanted Aqua for the job, any personal feelings aside, is that Aqua genuinely is a great actor. All of the off-camera stuff—initial script run through, full rehearsal, etc.—is being blended into a single practice take, and that’s all the practice anyone gets. With Aqua onboard, Kana finally has someone at her level that she can play off of. If acting is communication, these are two people who speak the same language.

As for Aqua’s actual role, he is, irony of ironies, playing a stalker villain who appears in the show’s finale. (Aqua in fact mentions this directly, which I’d qualify as a minor weakness. Rarely do you need to actually point irony out!) During the rehearsal, he does fine, and Kana compliments him afterward. Her little speech here is actually quite nice overall, and conveys the strong sense of kinship that she feels with Aqua, someone else who was also a child actor, left the field for a while, and is now trying to come back (Aqua has his own reasons for doing so, but she doesn’t know that). The animation—in fact, the kind of animation often known as character acting—bumps up here, and Kana’s broad smile and her huge, wide hand gestures are really something lovely.

They are contrasted quite a bit by a something Aqua overhears. The producer, Mr. Kaburagi, says to the director that Kana is great to throw into “any random role” because she’s so easy to work with, and says it’s great how they can leverage her remaining name recognition for such little money. In fact, his only complaint is that she’s so focused on acting in the first place, dismissing the entire show—his own production!—as little more than pure promo material. This seems to get under Aqua’s skin in a major way, and as he collects one of Kaburagi’s discarded cigs (remember, he’s trying to catch his mom’s killer at the end of the day, and the cigarette serves as a possible source of material for a DNA test), he decides that even if he’s already done what he came here for, he might as well make a strong impression on the way out the door. “Out with a bang” as he puts it.

On that note, the episode closes, so we’ll have to wait until next week for Aqua’s actual performance. It’s great to be back, and since I haven’t gotten to say it in a while, I’ll relish saying it here; see you next week, anime fans.

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