Gangsta.

Episode 9

After a tranquil moment inspired by Alex's song, the party breaks out in sudden violence. Blackmailed into the act, a Twilight attendee takes a stab at Loretta. Her bodyguards fight him off, but the mood is irrevocably altered. The kid arrives, finishes the assailant off, and starts beating on the guards. It turns out that he and his accomplice, Erica, are collecting tags for some unknown purpose. Loretta's bodyguard manages to subdue the kid just as Erica arrives. She goes after Loretta, only for Nico to tackle her through a window. As backup arrives, she manages to escape, but the Handymen are shocked that they recognize her face.

This episode suffers from the fact that I don't care about anyone besides our main trio, Nina, and maybe Loretta. For as much screentime as he's had, my thoughts on Boss Monroe are still “guy who the Handymen occasionally encounter during back alley fights.” The emotional reveal here doesn't have to do with him specifically, just one of his henchman, the blond Delico. Erica looks just like him and is likely his long-lost sister. Am I supposed to care? The guy had one conversation with Worick. I can hardly tell him apart from the other characters – there are too many “suited henchmen” in this cast. (Ivan, Erica's boss, is another one of Monroe's besuited goons, as well as a turncoat for the Corsicans. For a while, I thought he was Boss Monroe, because they look so much alike.)

The big problem is that our heroes are only tangentially involved in this plotline. They're not affiliated with any of the four families, so their stake in this game is abstract at best. It also has nothing to do with the much more engrossing story surrounding how the pair met or Alex's gradual integration into their lives. This should've been tied into earlier material. For example, show us Worick and Nico's past relationship with Boss Monroe. By this show's standards, the action was alright, although it still can't convey anything resembling excitement. As usual, I blame the music. It's improved recently (as with Alex's song last episode), but it still can't convey any mood other than “chill.”

It looks like Uranos Corsica is behind all the attempted assassinations of Ergastulum's gang leaders. What a surprise – the guy whose only trait is “massive bigot against the superpowered ethnicity encompassing most of the show's sympathetic characters” became the bad guy. I'm surprised that he's working with Erica and annoying-child, since they're almost definitely Twilights, but I guess genocide requires some compromises. In the end, Alex's brother Emilio arrives...as a member of their Twilight-killing gang! I'll take it. Alex is a character that I've known and developed some affection for, so this makes me feel something. Hopefully this plotline will carry over to the end of the series, and I won't have to write up the finale with a tab open on the wiki to make sense of character relationships. If the previous few weeks of Gangsta. played to the show's narrative strengths, this one encapsulates its weaknesses. It succeeds at small character moments and stories about an individual character's growth, but the series can't handle dramatic intrigue. Oh well. They can't all be winners.

Grade: C+

Gangsta. is currently streaming on Funimation.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.