Durarara!!×2

Episode 8

It's wheels within wheels within wheels this week, as the multiple separate plotlines this season has been building up begin to slam into each other. It's enough to make your head spin, and at first I had resigned myself to another needlessly complicated transition episode of this haphazard continuation, but then the Giant Plot Hammer came crashing down on all those minor threads as they suddenly webbed up in the middle of a grand storyline, and Durarara!! has my full attention and respect as a narrative again.

That's a lot of ground to cover in only twenty minutes, so here's how we got there from a very Slow Start.

First there's Masaomi, still living far away from his friends and communicating solely through the Dollars chatroom. His girlfriend teases him about this pretty ruthlessly, which is great because Masaomi deserves it, and he might as well hear it from someone who loves him. He still refuses to be fully honest with his friends or see them in person, even after the catastrophic events caused by the last time he acted this way. The best he can do is tell Mikado to stay indoors and not become involved with any more Dollars stuff, but even Masaomi seems to know that won't stop the bullet train headed his friend's way. Some weird combo of stubborn pride or shame over being used by Izaya is holding him back, but he can't weasel around this problem forever. For some reason, everyone's been missing from the Dollars chatroom these days, as Masaomi logs in day after day to an empty room. What's more, all the room's past chat logs have been deleted. Masaomi really can't use the net as a crutch anymore, and considering how this episode ends, I hope his girlfriend plants a big boot in his butt and gets him back to 'Bukuro ASAP.

Next, there's the syndicate plot. After she recovers from her fever, we get an earful on the runaway Akane's situation, complete with the perfect trigger to send Shizuo on the warpath. Apparently, Izaya told Akane that Shizuo was a hit man out to assassinate her, and Akane decided to approach this as a kill-or-be-killed situation. Well, she definitely thinks like a future crime lord! Touchingly, Shizuo contains his rage long enough to "go have a chat with his friend Izaya," which puts Akane at ease. Shinra wonders if Izaya could really be that bored, bringing a little girl into his feud with Shizuo for kicks. The truth of the matter turns out to be much darker, as Shizuo arrives at "Izaya's place" to a room full of syndicate stooge bodies, immediately framed as a murderer by the remaining witness.

Finally, Mikado has been shuttled out of his house against his will by Aoba and his fellow Blue Squares, shunted to a warehouse where the gang reveals that they are both Squares and Dollars, they are the ones responsible for injuring over twenty members of the Saitama biker gang, and that's not even the cherry on top of their wicked plan. Celty sees this and follows the pack to the warehouse, then Slon&Vorona see Celty alive and well, and follow her to the warehouse! It looks like that block's going to get even more crowded when Rokujo gets a call about finding the Dollars responsible for beating up his bikers. Thanks to some clever cross-cutting, we're led to think that Rokujo's going to rendezvous at the warehouse with Mikado, Aoba, Celty, Slon&Vorona, but in reality, he's mistaken Dotachin's bunch for the offending Dollars clear across town and-- AGH WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING?!

It seems ramshackle and random at first, but all this leads into a shocking climax when an all-members text arrives in all The Dollars' inboxes. It's a massive alert that Mikado didn't send: The Dollars are in danger. This is a message from Aoba, who successfully infiltrated the Dollars website a long time ago and has been working in cahoots with the information-brokering Izaya to put The Dollars at the center of a citywide war. Innocent Dollars have now been exposed as enemies of the vengeful Rokujo and his Toramaru thugs. Shizuo is not only outed as a Dollar, but also wanted for murder, kidnapping, and/or god-knows-what-else by Shiki's syndicate, which forces the involvement of Celty, Shinra, and the Russian hitmen as well. Aoba reveals all of this (apart from Izaya's involvement) to Mikado, along with the knowledge that Mikado is the shadow leader of The Dollars. He can use that information along with everything else he knows to burn The Dollars to the ground or make them the no-longer-anonymous villains at the center of the most violent gang war Ikebukuro has ever seen.

I assume this is Attempt #2 to open the path to Valhalla on Izaya's part. Aoba's motivations are different, but just as obvious. He can restore the Blue Squares to their former power, get revenge for his brother's arrest, and maintain his control over the group as a shadow-leader all in one fell swoop. He offers Mikado an ultimatum to stop the war before it starts: become the new public leader of the Blue Squares, and he can maintain his position over the peaceful and anonymous Dollars too, albeit with Aoba's hand firmly up his ass like the puppeteer he's always been.

Of course, Mikado will handle this the right way and everything will go back to normal. Won't he?

Maybe not. This is an outcome Mikado should have always been prepared for, (and something that I thought was going to happen way back in season one,) but he preferred to pretend that everything would be okay forever, living a fantasy of noncommittal even after he moved to Ikebukuro. Unlike Masaomi, Mikado still trusts Izaya, and it's clear that their last conversation has pushed his heart in the wrong direction. Even as he protests becoming the leader of the Blue Squares and Dollars all at once, he can't wipe the exhilarated smile off his face. Mikado has always wanted power. He just doesn't want his face attached to it, and even now, he's thinking of how he could still make that happen. Scary!

There's no one in the Dollars chatroom anymore. The colorless color gang and all its friends and foes are going to have to face each other in reality now, as new layers of anonymity are stripped away with each fresh tick of the clock. The episode ends on a gleeful Izaya, hidden away in a dark room and watching the whole disaster expand from his smartphone. He's created another city-ending conflict, without Masaomi or Saika's help, and Mikado is already turning to the dark side in just the way he wanted. It's going to take a lot more insanity to untangle this mess, and I can't wait to see how it all shakes down in future episodes.

Rating: B+

Durarara!!×2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.