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

There is a moment near the halfway point of “I’m Bisco”–Sabikui Bisco‘s penultimate episode–where the hookers from episode one show up again. It’s little more than a cameo; the populace of Imihama watching Milo and the Kurokawa-Tetsujin duking it out in the wastelands outside their city with bated breath.

But in that moment, I was led to think about how the show has grown and changed over these eleven weeks. What started as a post-apocalyptic mushroompunk (is that a word? It is now) tale of intrigue in a near-future city morphed into a traveler story and then, as it entered its final act, a much more traditional shonen, with Imihama Governor Kurokawa playing the role of the stock evil villain. (A role that, admittedly, suited him very well.) Now, Bisco is in its final stages, and has boiled down largely to its climactic final fight between Milo and the Kurokawa-Tetsujin. It’s not the ending I would’ve picked for the series, but that’s only marginally relevant when the time comes to discuss it. In the framework of what it’s trying to do, does Sabikui Bisco’s final act succeed? That is the question we should be asking ourselves as the series draws to a close.

Well, it’s not a total washout. But I think the fact that “it’s not a total washout” is the most positive descriptor I can muster speaks volumes. “I’m Bisco!” is divided roughly into two parts; the first involving the Kurokawa-Tetsujin attacking the Children’s Fortress from the episode of the same name. We do get some cool returning characters here; chiefly the town’s chieftain / leader / whatever term you’d care to use Nuts. Who I must confess, I forgot was called Nuts. What a great name.

He gets a fun little turn here where he covers for the other kids under his care, distracting the Kurokawa-Tetsujin as they flee the town. Milo shows up to properly give the thing a challenge not long after, of course, but it’s still a solid little interlude.

The second part of the episode is Milo’s challenge against the Kurokawa-Tetsujin proper, after a brief respite in the middle where he has to protect Pawoo, Tirol, and Jabi from the creature’s hitherto-unused main cannon, a massive weapon the fires appropriately huge blasts of Rust wind. This is where the cameo from the hookers (and several other Imihama citizens, all also from the first episode) comes in.

And it is nice to see our protagonist’s heroics being appreciated, although the actual fight choreography and such here is oddly workmanlike compared to last week’s.

The episode ends with Milo nearly getting killed after managing to get on top of the Kurokawa-Tetsujin and carve up part of its noggin with a knife. After doing so, he briefly (and mistakenly!) thinks the creature is dead, and takes the time to mourn Bisco when he finds the latter’s goggles embedded in its weird gelatin-y flesh. He nearly gets squashed for his trouble as the Tetsujin wakes back up, but he barely has time to process being smacked across half a city block by the monster before we get to this episode’s final revelation.

Surprise! Bisco wasn’t dead after all.

Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about this. Like superheroes, it’s fairly rare for a shonen protagonist to actually die and stay dead. (Goku alone has gone back and forth to and from the afterlife so often that he probably has a second house there by now.) But Bisco was incinerated in a pit of lava. Once you’ve established a character can survive that, any attempt at further raising of stakes just feels inherently hollow. Also Bisco’s right arm is all red and glow-y now, who knows what that’s about.

If this all feels a bit anticlimactic in the retelling, it’s moreso to actually watch. I said a few weeks ago that Sabikui Bisco falls apart when it’s forced to deal with large-scale dramatic stakes and I’ve yet to be proven wrong about that. This entire “Bisco lives on within Milo” subplot we’ve had running since the former initially died is rendered moot by his return. And while the Kurokawa-Tetsujin is a cool foe in a video game enemy kind of way, the knockoff Titan is not exactly the most compelling narrative force.

As a final, and I admit, deeply petty complaint, Pawoo once again gets about a minute total of actual fighting screentime before spending the rest of the episode worried about her brother and/or being protected by him from Rust-wind-laser-whatever attacks.

^{And also complaining about how slow trucks are.}

So, yeah, part of me does feel like the show is basically fizzling away into seafoam as it ends. I wasn’t bored while watching the episode, and I don’t want to give that impression, but it was hard to care about anything that happened on a stickier narrative level, and that’s a pretty big problem, given that we’re now heading into the finale.

Will episode 12 make up for episode 11’s shortcomings? Will I ever figure out a more compelling format to end these columns in? Only one way to find out, anime fans! Until next time.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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

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.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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

Milo isn’t actually dead. Are you surprised?

I, for one, wasn’t. Not that much, at least. As much as I mentioned last week that Sabikui Bisco actually killing off its lead would be a disaster, it bringing him back from the brink also feels more than a little hollow. Not the least of which is–you do heed the spoiler warnings at the tops of these articles, right?–that our other lead dies here, seemingly in a fashion that is a lot harder to write your way out of.

But we’ll get to all that. “I Love You” is actually, for the most part, a pretty good episode. Mostly because it plays to Sabikui Bisco‘s strengths–action sequences, weird worldbuilding, snappy dialogue, and colorful characters clashing with each other–but that central, ephemeral lack of a certain “something” is a problem. It’s been a minor one throughout the series, and although this is the best episode in a while, it’s also an episode that demonstrates why that’s so.

We open with Bisco nursing Milo back to health, in a scene that should be genuinely touching but mostly comes across as just sort of stupid. Here the two of you are, bonding over your blood brotherhood or your mutual homosexual tension or whatever this all is, and Milo says this.

It’s not an entirely serious offer and neither is the banter that follows, but the fact remains that this is a hilariously dumb thing to say in this situation. And look, I love Pawoo–I wouldn’t say she’s well-written, but that’s another matter–but why is the show pushing this as a thing? Even as an outside option? Pawoo and Bisco have negative chemistry. Unless I’m just forgetting something, they’ve interacted three times in the entire show. It’s only barely believable if it were simply that Bisco has a one-sided crush on Pawoo. It being mutual is just nuts.

And maybe it comes off like I’m nitpicking a minor exchange of dialogue that isn’t really supposed to be all that serious. Indeed, the show follows all that up with this exchange, which is genuinely very funny.

^{Ladies love a femboy with advanced medical knowledge.}

But this problem of a tone that is simply fundamentally “off” remains an issue throughout the episode, even in its strongest moments.

It is worth giving those moments their due, though. Most of the episode revolves around Kurokawa revealing his insidious evil plan and being duly punished for it. Spoiler alert: he meets his end here, but not before getting in some very over-the-top villainous gloating. This is a space that Sabikui Bisco can work in.

His plan, as he explains to a captive Jabi, is both simple in concept and hilariously stupid in execution. The natural Rust Wind doesn’t make quite enough people sick to keep his profits up, you see. His solution? Harvest the reactor unit inside one of the giant superweapons that blew Japan up in the first place–a Tetsujin, they’re called–and stick it in a bioengineered pink elephant. Have the elephant–sorry, the Ganesha Cannon–fire it wherever he wants, and let nature take its course by blowing the Rust Wind fallout all over the Japanese countryside.

Jabi also gets some incredibly raw dialogue in this scene, most notably when Kurokawa orders one of his henchmen to cut off his fingers so he can’t draw a bow anymore.

He doesn’t get the chance to show any of this off in-episode, because Bisco–who has been masquerading as one of said bodyguards throughout this entire sequence–sets to take him down once and for all.

This, too, is a space Sabikui Bisco can comfortably work in. The fights here are pretty great; we’ve got Kurokawa and Bisco themselves, fighting with both their lives on the line as the former has a total mental breakdown at his plans coming undone. Outside the facility they’re all in, we also get a quick cameo from Pawoo as she helps Jabi pummel a giant cyborg gorilla (?!) into submission, in what is somewhat-inexplicably probably the best-animated scene in the entire series thusfar.

^{It’s dope as hell so I’m not really complaining, just, what?}

And when Bisco finally does take down Kurokawa, it’s incredibly satisfying. He even throws Kurokawa’s whole “evil badass who loves vintage pop culture” shtick back in his face as he dies. Which, by the way, happens when Bisco tackles him into an open pit of lava.

The whole thing is viscerally satisfying…except for the fact that Bisco dies, too. Shot dead by Milo, at his own request, since he’d rather have had his closest friend take his life than drown in the sea of molten Rust.

This, really, feels like it should be very affecting, but it’s here that we run headlong into the series’ shortcomings again. No matter how hard it tries, Sabikui Bisco just can’t pull off these huge emotional beats. When Milo takes Bisco out by sniping him, and declares that he loves him¹, this should be a massive, intense moment. For me at least, it felt completely flat. Maybe even a bit unintentionally comedic. The longwinded speeches Bisco and Milo trade about how Bisco will always be with Milo and so on just land with a thud. It doesn’t work.

Why doesn’t it work? Maybe it’s because of all the show’s undercutting of its own central relationship. I’ve never really been clear on what Bisco and Milo actually mean to each other. They’re clearly close, but there are many, many different kinds of “close.” Are they close friends? Blood brothers? Gay for each other? Does Bisco consider Milo a sort of surrogate son, as one line in this episode suggests? Maybe all of these things, to some degree? It’s never really clear. I think part of this may be an issue of the compression of pacing inherent to anime adaptions, but there must have been a way to handle this in a fashion that made more sense.

I did see a few people around various social media haunts suggest that perhaps Milo loves Bisco in a romantic way but thinks Bisco is straight. Thus, half-jokingly trying to set Bisco up with his sister is a coping mechanism / something of an attempt to keep Bisco in his life. If this is true, I would say that Sabikui Bisco is simply not the sort of series that can sustain a relationship dynamic that complex. None of the fine shades of character detailing that would require are apparent in the text of the series. As such, Milo and Bisco’s relationship is pleasant, and they’re fun together, but defining it in any more certain terms is difficult because none of these pieces really fit together.

As for the actual final plot beat here, are Kurokawa and Bisco themselves actually dead? Probably, but it’s hard to put a definitive “yes” there, given that the series has proven willing to pull characters back to life. Still, it’d be one hell of a writing challenge to come up with a way for one or both of those characters to escape burning alive in a lava pit. That’s pretty definitively fatal.

There is of course, only one way to find out. Until next week, anime fans.

1: It’s worth noting that I believe the specific word here (aishiteru) usually has romantic connotations, but I may be mistaken.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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

There is a tendency in the action shonen genre, which I will charitably call “unfortunate,” where a female character who’s been previously shown to be a competent, strong combatant will be reduced to a damsel in distress role when the story’s stakes need to be raised. “Fiendish Trap”, the eighth episode of Sabikui Bisco, spends most of its opening few minutes showing Pawoo–a woman that other characters in-show have previously compared to an oni in terms of raw strength, and who was shown to be a more or less even match for our redheaded lead back in episode two–being tortured by Governor Kurokawa, the series’ Big Bad Evil Villain with No Morals. He has her chained up to a wall in some dank, gross-looking cell, and prods her in the gut with a hot iron. The show mercifully cuts back to Milo’s own reactions to all of this (this is apparently what we weren’t directly shown in the TV broadcast last week) before showing us much else, but the audio isn’t really any better.

This is all, suffice it to say, pretty stupid and gross. But if it were just stupid and gross, we could chalk it up as a flaw the series has. A pretty major one, to be certain, but a flaw nonetheless. Unfortunately, what the rest of the episode makes clear is that this is not something that Sabikui Bisco is pulling out in an attempt to shock viewers. It’s doing this because it has no better ideas, which may or may not be “worse,” but certainly bodes very badly for the remainder of the show.

The episode’s actual events are garden variety shonen hostage situation nonsense and are frankly not worth recapping in detail. Milo crashes Kurokawa’s HQ to rescue Pawoo and Jabi. There is a tense standoff; bows, arrows, and muscle-controlling mushrooms(!) are involved. None of it is terribly interesting despite the competent direction. When it looks like Milo’s going to bite it, surprise, Bisco bursts in to rescue him. And when Kurokawa eventually puts Bisco on the ropes, Jabi, who gets the episode’s best scene as we’re shown him breaking out of prison, bursts in to rescue him.

The net result of all this is that Kurokawa manages to get the secret to making the Rust-Eater work out of Milo, revealing that he used to be a Mushroom Keeper himself (how shocking), and that his motivation is to monopolize the production of the Rust-Eater drug so he can leverage it to squeeze ever more profit out of the sick, Rust-infested masses.

There is a tiny grain of actual real-world commentary in there, but when your villain takes eight episodes to explain something that Bun B once nailed in a single couplet¹, it is maybe time to reconsider what you’re writing and why. (To say nothing of if we’re meant to take this in a “pharmacies are complicit in the opioid crisis” sort of way or a “Covid vaccines have microchips in them” sort of way. It’s vague enough that you can easily read it however you want.) If we had known this from the start of the series, it would’ve been an additional shade of detail that made Kurokawa all the more despicable. It being treated as some huge twist–a politician? Valuing profit over the lives of his constituents? Perish the thought–is just insulting. Even the shonen genre’s target audience of teenage boys are more than smart enough to deserve better than this.

At the very least, it’d be more forgivable if the rest of the writing here were more interesting. Little about “Fiendish Trap” is even remotely compelling, a fundamental problem that dwarfs all the other sins here.

So, what does work in this episode? Well, there are some fun pop culture references. Kurokawa opens the episode by playing a Yu-Gi-Oh! pastiche with one of his henchmen, an amusing nod to voice actor Kenjirou Tsuda‘s most famous role, Seto Kaiba.

When Bisco busts in to rescue Milo from his own recklessness, Kadokawa cracks that he’s basically Tuxedo Mask, which, what, would make Milo Sailor Moon? That’s a fun thought.

There’s also a hilariously awesome sequence where Bisco catches a crossbow bolt in his teeth and flings it back at Kurokawa at full speed somehow.

The chain of rescues that comprise most of the episode’s actual events is also pretty funny when you think about it. With Milo initially setting out to rescue Pawoo, only to be rescued by Bisco, only for the both of them to be eventually rescued by an escaped Jabi, who also himself ends up freeing Pawoo. Pawoo, of course, does not get to save anyone. That would be letting a woman do something, and we obviously can’t have that.

The episode closes with Milo apparently dying in the snow–yes, really–as he and Bisco try to flee from Kurokawa’s facility. His last words to Bisco are a plea to stay alive.

I will give Sabikui Bisco some credit here. Usually, this sort of maudlin attempt at tear-jerking involves a straight couple, and the very fact that the title of the next episode is “I Love You” makes me comfortable calling Bisco and Milo one too. On the other hand, the more interesting of our two leads is dead with four episodes left to go. And if we do consider Bisco and Milo partners in more than just an “adventuring buddies” sense, this whole thing is a pretty rote and lame example of the whole “Bury Your Gays” routine.

Look, it’s not impossible that the show will come back from this somehow, but more than anything else the most damning thing I can say about “Fiendish Trap” is that despite everything that happens in it, it’s mostly pretty boring. I mention minutiae like pop culture references because the show’s actual story is just not holding my interest anymore, and I doubt I’m the only one. It feels like digging for scraps.

^{1: “They don’t care about the cure, they just wanna sell a treatment // Keep you alive by keepin’ you high, now that’s some street shit.” – Bun B – “U A Bitch”, Return of The Trill. Did I reference this mostly just because I like UGK? Don’t worry about it.}

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.