Sakamoto Days

Episode 10

After spending the last few weeks with Mr. Deer and friends, this is a more chill episode of Sakamoto Days. The first half sees the show returning to the Assassin of the Week format, while the latter sees us learning more about Xiaotang's mafia family. Neither is among the show's best material. The first half manages to provide a decent amount of laughs and the latter half is a bit more of a slog.

The first segment sees Sakamoto and the family taking a trip to the bathhouse for some R&R after everything that went down at the lab. Unfortunately for them, the person running the counter at the bathhouse happens to recognize Sakamoto and decides to go for his bounty so he can stop living with his parents. Or at least it would be a problem, if not for how badly all his attempts to kill Sakamoto keep failing. Whether it's turning up the jetstream in the bath to launch Sakamoto out of it, or trying to turn the sauna into a raging inferno, literally nothing he does seems to so much as faze the big guy, and he sees it all as part of the experience. It's some good quality slapstick, and it's made all the funnier by having Shin be the one to fall victim to each attempt while everyone else is convinced he's too much of a wimp to handle some perfectly normal bathtime. Eventually, the assassin's antics get cut short when he's recognized by a couple of former colleagues, and they start mocking him for flunking out of the assassin's life and going back to the family business. However, Sakamoto happens to overhear the conversation and bails him out with his usual theatrics by knocking one out with a ping pong ball and slamming the other into a vending machine. It turns out that Sakamoto was aware he was being targeted the whole time but chose to play it off. After getting complimented on how exciting of a bathhouse experience he gave, the assassin decides to commit to inheriting the family business. It's a happy ending. Or it would be, if not for the great punchline of his parents thinking it's too late for him to come crawling to them and that he doesn't deserve anything. This certainly isn't the funniest segment we've gotten out of the show, but I had a good time with it so if that had been the whole episode, I would been pretty satisfied

The back half was a lot more of a drag. Sakamoto, Shin and Xiaotang decide to relax at a family restaurant, and it turns out to be a new experience for Xiaotang as she was used to finer cuisine during her days as a mafia princess. Despite this, she claims to be pretty happy with her current life which makes her all the more aggravated when her former advisor Wutang shows up looking to bring her back. In addition to having no desire to go back to the mafia, Xiaotang doesn't have much tolerance for Wutang in general, as he's been stalking her the whole time he's been working under his family, and much of his antics here are him getting nosebleeds from basically anything she says, which gets annoying pretty fast. He's not willing to take no for an answer and when he decides to stage a contest to take her back in exchange for information on Sakamoto's bounty, Xiaotang agrees to help Sakamoto out. But rather than holding a contest of strength (mainly because he recognizes right away that Shin and Sakamoto could pound him into the dirt), he decides to center it around gambling at a casino. While Shin's mind reading would theoretically give them the edge here, neither he nor Sakamoto know the first about gambling and they're clearly out of their depth on this one. That works well enough as a cliffhanger, but between this being a bit of an uninteresting setup, and Wutang's gimmick not being funny, I can't say I'm too invested in seeing how the rest of this plays out. Maybe it'll manage to get more out of this casino plot next week, but otherwise, I'm hoping it won't take too long for the show to swing back around to something more interesting.

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Sakamoto Days is currently streaming on Netflix on Saturdays.