Love of Kill

Episode 4

While Château still isn't much of a character on her own just yet, a lot of the circumstances informing her character both in the past and the present are interesting. The first half of the episode progresses the present plot of having Château be once again taken hostage just to draw out Ryang-ha, which was a little disappointing because the move she pulled with the taser to catch the dude off guard was legitimately cool. But we can't quite give her a win just yet, so she will continue to be a hostage until Ryang-ha and his ex-coworker can resolve their issues. I will say I sort of wish the preview didn't immediately spoil one of the cliffhangers in this episode even if it was really obvious what was going to happen, but I digress.

This episode gives us more insight into Château's past, and while a lot of it could be easily inferred by the preview that we got at the end of episode one, I still found it engaging for two reasons. For one, I legitimately bought into the family dynamic between young Château and this new adoptive family that took her in. I'm confused by her mother's implication that they took everything away from Château when she clearly didn't really have anything when they found her (not even a name that others would recognize). However, the scene of her adoptive father going to the orphanage to take her in felt genuinely affecting, and you really do get the sense that he was one of the first people that she really ever opened up to, which might explain why she became even more closed off emotionally after he died.

The second thing that kept me engaged was how Ryang-ha fits into all of this. He clearly had some involvement with Château in the past; there's been enough foreshadowing from earlier episodes and from the show's ending sequence to imply that. My original theory was that he was the driver found with Château, but it's clearly a different body just with the same name. Is that Ryang-ha's real name or did he take it as a means of seeing if Château would recognize it? What was life like for both of these people before Château got abducted? Was their meeting that kicked off the series a coincidence or was it something that Ryang-ha had been pursuing from the beginning? Lots of interesting questions raised with some decent payoffs and just enough emotional residence to make this one of the more engaging episodes of the show so far.

Rating:

Love of Kill is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.