Durarara episode 3

Up until this epis­ode, Dur­arara has got­ten by through its poten­tial. It’s flaunt­ing its qual­ity but spend­ing most of its time intro­du­cing char­ac­ters and reveal­ing this mad world of Ikebukero to you in bit and pieces. But it hadn’t been truly enjoy­able, at least to the extent that it was prom­ising us. With epis­ode 3 we finally see the change from poten­tially awe­some to truly awe­some. Nor­mally I’d try to demon­strate why this epis­ode was so amaz­ing with one screen­cap but it appears that all the awe­some­ness never man­aged to appear at the same time. So I’m afraid you’ll just have to click that ‘read more’ but­ton. Oh poor you~

So why was this epis­ode so awe­some. I hate to be the guy who con­stantly com­pares this to Bac­cano, but it used the same tac­tics that made Bac­cano so enjoy­able. You had a bunch of total psy­cho wacko char­ac­ters inter­act­ing and fight­ing. One thing that’s dif­fer­ent between the two is Mikado. The idea of hav­ing a nor­mal guy as the main char­ac­ter in a show full other nut­ters would be frus­trat­ing but it’s been hugely enter­tain­ing to see his reac­tions to everything. Bac­cano never had the ‘straight man’ char­ac­ter. I ori­gin­ally thought that Mikado would just be a bystander in all this chaos but it appears he might have some­thing to do with the over­all story. Is there any other way to explain why Izaya (phone-stomping guy, in case you for­got the names. I cer­tainly do) looked at him when say­ing ‘I was search­ing for someone’.

Argh, if I was to try go through this epis­ode in my usual way I’d end up typ­ing a string of end­less praises and des­per­ately try­ing to think of syn­onyms for ‘awe­some’. Instead, I’m going to go through this by how awe­some each char­ac­ter was. Num­ber 1: Masaomi

It’s easy to for­get, what with that fight in the second half of the episode, that he even did any­thing in the epis­ode. The guy’s a nut­ter, like prac­tic­ally every other char­ac­ter in this show. His enthu­si­asm is infec­tious but he man­ages to toe the line that most hyper­act­ive char­ac­ters in that he never gets on your nerves. With other hyper char­ac­ters like Tomo from Azu­manga Daoih, their hyper­act­ive nature stops being infec­tious and just gets annoy­ing. What makes Masaomi dif­fer­ent from the rest is he’s clearly not an idiot. He spot­ted the wor­ried look on Mikado’s face and inter­preted it cor­rectly, albeit with his usual added flowers and fab­ulous­ness. Plus, it was a bit of a shock to see him act so reserved around Izaya. Even if we hadn’t seen him semi-convince a girl to com­mit sui­cide you’d still know there was some­thing ser­i­ously dan­ger­ous about this guy.

Last epis­ode I wasn’t quite con­vinced by Izaya. He was more of those all-knowing vil­lains he plod around and spout mono­logues on how there is no good or evil and so on and so forth. That’s why I loved watch­ing the guy get­ting clobbered by the bin. It took the guy down sev­eral rungs and it showed that he’s not quite the invin­cible the last epis­ode por­trayed him as. Yep, his best scene of the epis­ode was not the epic phone stamp­ing laugh (which, btw, is abso­lutely hil­ari­ous to listen to fast-forwarded), nor was it his instant scalping tech­nique. His best scene was being flattened by a pro­jectile bin.

But the real star of the show, the guy who stole the epis­ode even though he only appeared for about 5 minutes, was Shizuo. Described rather accur­ately as viol­ence in human form, what makes him dif­fer­ent from the other bunch of nut­ters both in this show and Bac­cano is that there’s noth­ing in the way of flair in his actions. While there’s an odd beauty to Izaya pirou­et­ting around ran­dom thugs, bran­dish­ing his flick knife, Shizuo is unre­fined. In that scene where he sys­tem­at­ic­ally flat­tens that gang of fake dol­lars, he knocks out one of the guys with a sort of lazy headbutt. This actu­ally makes his trendy bar­tender clothes all the more ironic. Heck, want some­thing even more ironic? Nicked this off a ran­dom forum:

‘Shizuo’ = ‘quiet man’
’Hei­wajima’ = ‘peace­ful island’

Let’s not for­get our nar­rator for the epis­ode. Simon (thank you Gur­ren Lagann. Now I will always pro­nounce it as ‘sih-monn’ instead of ‘sigh-mun’ in my mind) was hil­ari­ous to watch, with his amaz­ing advert­ising. Why, doesn’t the urge to go eat sushi just skyrocket when a giant black Rus­sian tells you that you won’t die from it. Shin­maru the­or­ized that the guy would even­tu­ally show even­tu­ally show off some sort of phe­nom­enal power and be yet another psy­cho in a show already packed full of them. I was of the opin­ion that he would be more of a gentle giant type char­ac­ter. What we got was a hybrid of the two. While he only jumps into fights to stop them, any­one who can take a punch from Shizuo and keep his clothes on is worthy of respect.

And that’s just those char­ac­ters, there was just so much packed into this epis­ode that I loved. Did any­one else notice that thug doing some sort of pocket mas­turb­a­tion behind those girls? I know gang mem­bers quite often walk around with the hand cup­ping their groinal regions but his hand was mov­ing far too vig­or­ously for it to be any­thing else. That might explain why the guy’s trousers were a bit wet after­wards. It had noth­ing to do with being scared of Izuya. He had just…ok, I’m going to stop that train of thought before I go too far.

From left to right: Dur­arara; Cenco­roll; Not entirely sure, could be Kur­oshit­suji or Bac­cano again;this time with Maiza and Csez. don’t know; don’t know; Hell Girl. They even tossed a Yoza­k­ura Quar­tet book in later for the hell of things.

OK, the­or­iz­ing time! Props to Extrange for point­ing this out to me; in the open­ing just at the end we see a head in a jar. Does that belong to our favour­ite head­less horse­women? Does it look that sim­ilar to the head of the girl with the scar on her neck? There hasn’t been any talk of the where­abouts of Celty’s head thus far so it’s kinda hard to the­or­ize some­thing that hasn’t been alluded to in the show itself. Just for a quick com­par­ison, does the head look any sim­ilar to that girls?

Hmm, it’s kinda dif­fi­cult to tell but there’s noth­ing blatantly obvi­ous to say they are dif­fer­ent. Same hair col­our, same length. Ah who cares, let’s just now bask in what was a glor­i­ous piece of mad­ness. Brains Base, you’ve done it again. I swear, if wasn’t for Akikan, I’d say they were one of the most con­sist­ently awe­some stu­dios. With an awful lot of people tout­ing Shaft as the great new stu­dio, I’m stick­ing my neck out for Brains Base. Let us just com­pare the two for a second. This sea­son, Brains Base released Dur­arara. Shaft have gone with that trav­esty that is Vam­pire Bund. Brains Base > Shaft.

I couldn’t find a place to put this pic­ture in so far so I thought I’d toss it in at the end. Crown­ing Moment of Random?