Durarara!! episode 22

Finally! While the plot didn’t exactly move for­ward in leaps and bounds in this epis­ode, at least we has some­thing of sig­ni­fic­ance hap­pen in what was a thor­oughly enter­tain­ing epis­ode oth­er­wise. If I was to con­tinue my 4-koma from last week, Ikebukero’s feet are no longer touch­ing the grounds of peace and is no plunging quite firmly towards chaos, look­ing some­thing like this:

In case you were won­der­ing, those things com­ing out from his head are arms from chaos drag­ging Ikebukero in, kinda like those creepy hands that come out of the Gate of Truth in Full Metal Alchemist.

The para­met­ers of this epis­ode were pretty small. Anri gets atar­geted by the Yel­low Scarves only to get repeatedly saved by the Dol­lars. How­ever the Dol­lars meth­ods of res­cue were so inef­fec­tual that this would only res­ult in a tem­por­ary res­cue that gained Anri on aver­age an extra 30 seconds of free­dom. It doesn’t say much for the Dol­lars if their com­bined efforts leave Anri in a town square sur­roun­ded by the Yel­low Scarves. OK, at least their two ace-cards of Celty and Shizuo had arrived on the scene by then. How­ever Celty would almost cer­tainly have been chased off by the police moments after she tried to res­cue Anri, while Shizuo only saved the day by acci­dent because he was pissed off and the Yel­low Scarves just so happened to be the closest thing he could be viol­ent towards (I sup­pose he could have taken out his anger on his phone see­ing as Izaya got bored of that hobby ages ago, but that’s not really Shizuo’s style).

Shizuo is awe­some, isn’t he? I love Izaya because I can end­lessly ana­lyse him and I love Celty because she’s moe and I can end­lessly ana­lyse her, I love Shizuo simply because he is awe­some by default. Even though the Yel­low Scarves met Simon halfway through their chase of the bunny girl, it was only when they hit the extremely angry brick wall of Shizuo did their chase come to an end. Since I’ve got foot­ball on the brain, Shizuo works best in Dur­arara as an impact sub­sti­tute. When he’s the main focus of the fight it’s just him beat­ing up shit. How­ever intro­duce him to pro­ceed­ings late on in the game and his impact is fant­astic. This was him at his best since he clocked Izaya with a bin. He enters pro­ceed­ings, along with his cus­tom BGM, and com­pletely steals the show. Out of all the char­ac­ters in this show, Shizuo may just be the one who will live in anime fandom’s memor­ies the longest.

The one per­son Shizuo has to con­tend with for that title is Celty. Now that she’s no longer centre of atten­tion, watch­ing her every­day life with Shinra has man­aged to become more enter­tain­ing. I’m no longer left ques­tion­ing the dubi­ous rela­tion­ship between the two (although Celty did do a little shout out to his untrust­worthy­ness) and just left enjoy­ing the odd way of life when liv­ing with a head­less Irish fairy who sends your games con­soles to other dimen­sions. I really want her to come back into the pic­ture again.

What has happened to the Celty part of Izaya’s plans any­way? I’m start­ing to think I’ve mis­judged his plans with the whole Val­halla thing (wouldn’t be the first time I’ve got­ten some­thing wrong in Dur­arara, as this tag is test­a­ment to). He plans to bring war and chaos into Ikebukero in order to awaken the Dul­la­han head. How­ever I’m pretty sure there was a second part to his plan he con­cocted with Shin­gen (what on earth has happened to him any­way?) which involved Celty becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with life and her rela­tion­ships with vari­ous Ikebukero folk, most import­antly Shinra. How­ever they seem to be liv­ing a pretty cosy life together at the moment. Celty doesn’t appear to be exud­ing any sort of apo­ca­lyptic indu­cing tend­en­cies at all. There’s only 2 epis­ode left and I can’t see how they’re going to rein­tro­duce that half of the story, espe­cially when you con­sider the pace the story has been mov­ing at recently.

Mean­while, Mikado con­tin­ues his attempts at piss­ing off pretty much every­one watch­ing the show with his gen­eral facepalm-inducing moves. I know vari­ous other people blog­ging Dur­arara, along with the for­ums I visit on occa­sion, are gen­er­ally of the opin­ion that he is a giant ignora­mus but my opin­ion of him has rarely ven­tured bey­ond indif­fer­ence. How­ever his decision to shut down the Dol­lars is baff­ling. Someone needs to repeat to him the Shinji man­tra of ‘I musn’t run away’ because that’s all the idiot is doing. Kida is not a whole lot bet­ter, just tak­ing the option of going along with the tide with a bored expres­sion on his face, some­thing he’d decided to do last epis­ode. Then again, I can’t really see what they could do oth­er­wise in their pos­i­tion so I will lay off heap­ing any cri­ti­cism on their poor souls. They’re a bunch of ang­sty teen­agers being manip­u­lated by Grand Dick Izaya. Life’s pretty tough on them without us heap­ing scorn upon their mis­for­tunes. Admit­tedly it doesn’t make for a riv­et­ing view­ing exper­i­ence though.

The epis­ode ends with Shizuo get­ting shot, with the chances of him dying about sim­ilar to the chances of North Korea win­ning the world cup, and I’m try­ing to work out who would exactly care that he’s no longer ter­ror­iz­ing Ikebukero? His employer, Tomo Tanaka, would prob­ably care but he holds as much sway in Ikebukero as a tea­cup in a nuc­lear war. His brother might come to visit him, which would be fun to see but ulti­mately irrel­ev­ant. The only other per­son he seems to be friends with is Celty. Sud­denly, the one other per­son Celty seems to care about get ser­i­ously injured? Sud­denly Izaya’s plan to dis­il­lu­sion Celty is com­ing into focus a bit more.