MARRIAGETOXIN

Episode 11

At this point. Kimie's increasingly diminishing presence in her own arc is downright criminal. While last week's episode at least compensated for that by giving her and Gero a couple of scenes together to help progress their relationship, she doesn't get much of anything this time around. In fact, her total screen time here is only about a minute, and none of it brings her any closer to pulling off a successful jailbreak. Our poor hamster disaster girl deserves better than this, and while she's still likely to have the bulk of this arc's finale to herself, it's a shame she's had to share so much of this arc with other characters.

The rest of this episode's runtime is otherwise just a pair of extended fight scenes with Piichi and Gero each taking a swing at Dogo and his helper, Byakko, which is all fine enough, but does threaten to drag a little. Between the two, Piichi's part of the fight is probably the most substantial, as it includes a bit of backstory for Byakko and a brief reminder of what Piichi's fighting for, though neither of these intermissions really leaves much of an impact. Byakko's story of having to watch her mom die from illness because the Beast Clan was only willing to lend out medical aid to members of their bloodline with animal partners does mesh pretty well with the kind of elitism we've seen the hierarchy of the assassin underworld running on, but it was a bit too generic a side to leave me feeling emotional.

If that was the intent, it was undercut by having Byakko's backstory followed up by her getting defeated by Piichi almost immediately. It's such a hard smash cut that it nearly gives the impression this entire flashback was meant to be treated as some punchline. Given how many times the episode cuts back to it, I can only assume it's meant to be completely sincere, which makes Byakko's initial defeat feel a little anticlimactic. Her later transformation into a chimera-like abomination also felt a little wonky; while it's certainly not out of step with the levels of escalation this show operates on, it still feels like a bit much, and some of the 3DCG used to render it doesn't exactly help alleviate that impression. I did appreciate how this sudden shift led Piichi to power through it only after getting a timely call from his girlfriend, but I wish the execution there had been a little sharper. It's a good comedic setup and is one of the few bits of the show's rom-com side we get this week. Aside from some nice battle animation out of it, it didn't quite do enough to lean into the inherent silliness of the situation visually. I would have loved to see this phone call culminate in Piichi getting a visible power boost akin to Popeye cracking open a can of spinach. What we got here is perfectly cool, but this is perhaps the one instance where I wish the presentation weren't quite as over the top as it could have been

Sadly, that's all I really have to say about the episode, as Gero's intervention in this fight has yet to amount to much, and while Dogo seems to be pushing him more than his other opponents, we'll have to wait until next time to see how that wraps up. It was at least a little nice to see a little more of Kinosaki's perspective on getting roped into all these life-or-death situations because of Gero. Gero vowing to protect him so they could get back to their “practice” dates was arguably the most romantic moment of the episode. All the flashbacks leading up to it felt a bit too much like a recap and only made the episode feel slower than it already was. Under a similar vein, while it seem like Byakko's flashback might have provided a chance to humanize Dogo a bit, any points he gets for comforting Byakko as a crying kid are quickly negated by him revealing he just wanted to use her new beast form as a sacrifice so he could turn his arm into an even more absurd looking monster, so he remains as much of a moustache-twirling villain as ever. While I'm still having a good time with this show, this episode is easily the most it's threatened to feel like a slog, and now that the season's about to come to a close, I can only hope that whatever payoff we get at the end of this arc will be enough to make it all worth it.

Rating:

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MARRIAGETOXIN is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.