Chainsmoker Cat

Episode 5

Color me shocked, folks, but this week marks Chainsmoker Cat's graduation to a real, bona fide television show. It's been a mostly excellent collection of gross-out humor and bizarre characterization so far, don't get me wrong, but in this fifth episode Chainsmoker Cat dials the degeneracy way down to actually focus on building its world and telling a fleshed-out story. What's even more surprising is how successful the show is at doing this. Last week, I worried that the show would lose a lot of its appeal if it lost the ability to deliver shockingly well-animated scenes of disgusting excess. Here, we really only get two or three moments that are even attempting to shock and offend, and it's the most watchable the show has ever been. Will the wonders never cease?

Imoko gets a surprising amount of screen time this week, and her story is a predictably melancholy one, even if the cold-open she shares with Yani gives us the nastiest bit of animation in the whole episode (and I cannot help but wonder what kind of messed up reference material the animators even got a hold of to properly depict Yani extracting that slimy pack of cigarettes from her stomach). Being the cute and responsible young lady that she is, Imoko is the object of at least one young human boy's affections, but Imoko can't bring herself to return the crush. Throughout the episode we get insight into the subtle downsides of being a vulnerable teenager with superhuman reflexes and hearing. While I'm sure Imoko's ability to hear whenever anyone is talking shit behind her back might be contributing to her insecurity, I also cannot help but wonder if years of being Yani's caretaker have simply warped the poor girl's sense of what it means to be in a relationship. She says the boy who likes her is just too “put together.” God help Imoko if she has become the kind of person who can only be attracted to living garbage fires that just need to meet that perfect someone to fix them up and douse all the flames.

Meanwhile, the antics of Yani and Co. give us a lot of insight into the larger state of this alternate universe. Some of these lore crumbs are just that: Tiny crumbs of possibilities that are fun (and also kind of depressing) to puzzle over. Yaku is exhibiting some clear signs of institutionalization from whatever life she lived before becoming a consistently unemployed junkie; I am assuming her instinctual response to the identification number “Twelve” is a remnant of her stint in prison? As we've seen evidence of over and over again, too, life on the outside isn't exactly easy for the beastfolk of the world. The “Beastfolk Edition” Game of Life that the girls play drop all sorts of facts about the discrimination and stereotypes about their kind that make it all but impossible for anyone identifying as non-human to even win the game. A good job? Forget about it. A relationship with a human that may lead to greater financial prospects and maybe also a loving spouse? Fat chance. Some of the girls comment that the game is "outdated" in its representation, but come on, now. We all know the score for the amount of progress and acceptance any minority group is actually able to achieve in the span of a generation. Yaku's desire to just play as a human and at least pretend that she has a shot at the good life is just painfully relateable, man.

Yaku is kind of the emotional core of the whole episode, as it turns out. Her quest to find even one friend who is willing to take some time off and go bug hunting with her is legitimately sad, and when Yani ends up being the one to blow off work and take a day trip with her unemployed friend, you see the sparks of genuine friendship that make Yani as likeable as she's ever been. Of course, Yani is still a hopeless screw up, as we see when the gang visits the indigenous Alpha tribe of beastfolk who grow tobacco in the woods on the outskirts of the city. Leave it to Yani to screw up her introduction to a clan that can provide her with all of the free smokes she could ever hope to inhale by pointing out that the tribe's customary tattoos look like dicks and vaginas. I don't even know what to make of Chief Lani whipping out an alien ray-gun to nearly vaporize the Cat Crew. I'll leave it to Mewlder and Scully to figure out if all these beastfolk are actually aliens from another world or not.

Lest you think that Chainsmoker Cat has completely lost its humiliating and foul sense of self, this trip to the Alpha Tribe ends with one of the funnier pee gags I think I've seen in an anime, for whatever that might be worth. That's just the kind of anime this is, after all. Can anyone think of a more wholesome way to cap off an episode than by having a terrified bungee-jumping streamer squirt out a cat-piss rainbow to color the sky with those vibrant ammonia hues? It's like a twisted message of spite straight from the perverted otaku God that allowed this anime to happen. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Episode Rating:

Chainsmoker Cat is currently streaming on Netflix and OceanVeil.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.