Sabikui Bisco

Episode 5

No wasteland is complete without a city populated and governed exclusively by children. With good reason too, as it's rich with creative potential for evoking the extent of the societal somersault that follows in the wake of disaster. Sabikui Bisco's breezy pacing means that we don't get a whole lot of time to explore every corner of their makeshift city—that's the downside of an anthological structure—but it makes up for it with sharp writing. By focusing on the plight of a few of the children, and contrasting Pawoo's rest stop horror show against Bisco and Milo's kid-gloved incarceration, the episode keeps its gears greased and my attention gripped. Plus, the climax is a fungal artillery showdown against a fleet of flying fugu fish. You can't beat that. 

While I honestly expected Milo to be the richer character based on first impressions, Bisco's been no slouch in the three-dimensional personality department. As his hair color would indicate, he's ultimately still the loud and hot-headed side of the equation. However, he's proving to be as smart as Milo, and even more resourceful. I mean, maybe he just has zero filter between his brain and mouth, but you could argue that he strategically pisses the kids off in return for food, shelter, and a laughably easy escape opportunity. Rather than appeal to sentimentality, he gives it straight to their leader, which ends up being just what he needed to hear to move past his father's oversized legacy. I also love the dryness of his asides, as well as the gap moe that Milo effortlessly teases out of him. Even though a sci-fi action show about weaponized mushrooms doesn't really need super complex characters, Bisco has enough shades to elevate the series beyond mindless fun. 

Further elevating the anime above mere dumb fun is the highly political focus of its core themes. Kurokawa's influence extends well beyond the lights of Imihama, and the children's story follows up on the earlier idea that power boils down to not just physical might, but knowledge as well. Kurokawa manipulates an entire city into servitude simply by wielding misconceptions about the Rusty Wind. It's a deception undone by one good doctor, but that's only well after the damage is done. And this also explains why Kurokawa was so intent on pulling Milo into his grasp. While no single person can control a disease, controlling and manipulating the knowledge of and around a disease can be just as effective, at least when it comes to politics. The story of COVID-19, for example, has arguably been more political than it's been biological, especially in terms of the factors and bad actors that have exacerbated its spread and effect. This is timely stuff. 

This is where Pawoo's subplot slots in. On the surface, her run-in with the elderly couple has no intersection with Milo and Bisco's journey outside of letting us know that she's actively chasing them. Thematically, however, the couple's story makes for a powerful and disturbing point of contrast against the children's. The pair are stuck in the past, to the extent that they've become obsessed with preserving it in a grotesque underground diorama of half-alive mummies. They blame their lot on the actions of a Mushroom Keeper, and based on a Jabi's warning about less-than-savory types who could prioritize science over people's lives, it's entirely believable as well.  

But the key part for me is the way their xenophobic attitude goes hand in hand with their death cult behavior. They're not struggling against doomsday, and they're not quietly acquiescing to it; they're accelerating it. By taking a lone villain, real or imaginary, as representative of the whole, they find ample justification for their own horrible actions. They seal themselves inside with their sins rather than confront the possibility that they might have been wrong. In practice, this comes across as a bit silly and sensationalized—there's not enough runtime to make their heel-turn less cartoonishly foreshadowed—but the core is solid and affecting. While it might be difficult to find a serial embalmer in your neighborhood, the bitter crowing of the resentful and the eschatology-obsessed is always present and always loud. 

The children, therefore, represent an opposing line of thought. Despite losing their parents and suffering from disease, they haven't stopped struggling against the world's harshness, and they haven't stopped looking for hope. They're open to help from a sketchy Mushroom Keeper and a meek traveling doctor, and that openness drives back the blowfish and heals their lesions. You can definitely read some generational commentary into this—the older population's proximity to death grants them a luxury to “give up” that younger people can't afford en masse—but I think it comes down to conservative lines of thinking versus more liberal ones. I like, too, that Milo refuses the mantle of savior and instead teaches the kids how to make their own medicine. Progress can't be top-down; it has to be built from the ground up and distributed evenly to the people who need it the most. They may never see Milo again, but they can become their own Milos, who will be able to fan out and create even more Milos in other settlements, and so on.  

Now, while characters and themes may be very important for nerds like me, I should also stress that Sabikui Bisco remains a ton of fun to watch. Out of all of its component visual parts, I'm still most in love with its set design. The giant totem in the middle of the city, for instance, not only looks like a sick Mad Max prop, but also powerfully reinforces the idea that Tetsujin, whatever it was, exploded violently and scattered its body parts all across Japan. The whole world is living in its shadow—it just happens to be particularly literal in their town. Action-wise, Sabikui Bisco prioritizes staging and cleanliness over kinetic energy, but that's hardly a bad thing, and any relative stiffness is more than made up for when the enemies are giant buck-toothed sky blowfish. While perhaps the best version of this adaptation would be one with enough resources and looseness to lean fully into the colorful psychedelia of its psilocybin-infused wasteland, it still looks pretty darn nice. 

In short, Sabikui Bisco delivers yet another great installment full of pep and pop. I think I've rated it four stars every week now, and quite frankly it deserves it! I'm waiting for an episode to really blow me away, but the dogged consistency of its presentation and surprisingly elegant snappiness of its writing are two engines still purring away into the midseason. And the prospect of Tirol returning next week is good enough to distract me from Kurokawa completely owning Jabi at the end. Hang in there, old man. 

Rating:  

Sabikui Bisco is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Steve can be found on Twitter if you want to read his World's End Harem livetweets. Otherwise, catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.