Sakamoto Days
Episode 11
by Jairus Taylor,
How would you rate episode 11 of
Sakamoto Days ?
Community score: 3.9
The first stretch of this episode is pretty straightforward as Sakamoto and Shin try to figure out how to out-gamble Wutang. While they may not know the rules for games like roulette or poker, they at least know how to make up for it with some good old-fashioned cheating. Shin uses his mind reading to figure out when the card dealers are bluffing, while Sakamoto manipulates the roulette wheel by flicking poker chips at it faster than the eye can see, and even if neither is laugh-out-loud hilarious, it's still pretty fun seeing everyone at the casino struggling to figure out how they're cheating. Eventually, they manage to bring the competition to a draw, but rather than settle the tie through a more traditional casino game like blackjack or poker, Xiaotang recommends they all play a game of Old Maid instead.
Once again, Shin assumes that his mind-reading will give him an edge since he can just read the emotions of whoever's holding the Old Maid, but his plans quickly derail when that person turns out to be Xiaotang, and her poker face leaves much to be desired (and for as unfunny as most of Wutang's obsession with Xiaotang is, I did get a kick out of him taking the card so she wouldn't feel bad). Wutang also figures out the trick to Shin's mind reading, and correctly deduces that he can only read verbalized thoughts and takes him out of the game pretty quickly by overloading him with gibberish. In the middle of all this, we get a bit of Wutang's backstory and how he was looked down on for being frail until Xiaotang pointed out to him that he could make his way through the mafia with his brains. It does a decent enough job of explaining Wutang's devotion to her, but beyond that, it's not all that interesting, and while I already didn't care much for him or his antics, I can't say it did anything to change my opinion there.
In the end, Sakamoto manages to prevail by simply gripping his other remaining card so tightly that Wutang is left with little option but to pull the Old Maid by mistake and concede defeat. While that makes for a decently funny conclusion, Wutang's men are far less amused and decide to turn on him for wasting time with games instead of taking back Xiaotang by force. This leaves Wutang with little choice but to temporarily join forces with Sakamoto to defend her, and although it makes for a decent enough fight montage, it's not exactly one that feels big enough to close out the season with, and it just makes this casino arc feel like an awkward stopping point.
The decision to pause here makes a little more sense afterward, as once Wutang realizes Sakamoto is better equipped to protect Xiaotang, he decides to confess what he knows about Sakamoto's bounty. At first, he doesn't say anything that the others don't already know about Slur, but that changes when he reveals that Slur was recently seen breaking into a high-security prison and that some of its most dangerous inmates have made their way to Japan. We soon discover that Kashima has hired them on Slur's behalf with the sole purpose of targeting Sakamoto and his associates. While they seem like a pretty wild bunch (I love that one of them looks like Light Yagami if his bangs were covering half his face), we'll have to wait until July to see any of them in action. It works well enough for a cliffhanger but considering how much more exciting Sakamoto's train battle was a couple of weeks ago, I wish the season had closed out on that instead.
Despite that bit of disappointment, though, I'd say that on the whole, I had a fairly good time with this first season. While it hasn't had the level of production quality we've seen out of other recent Shonen Jump adaptations, it still managed to be fun more often than not, and the combination of its absurd humor and equally absurd world, have done a lot to help even out the uneven display of its action scenes. Despite a lot of fears that a more middling production would cause the show to have less of an audience, it still seems as though this was one of the biggest hits of the season, and managed to avoid crashing and burning altogether. Given that a lot of the upcoming material is more reliant on action than humor, I am a bit worried about how the second half of the show will shake up in July. It has so far largely proved that it can still be fun even without a ton of bells and whistles. So long as it can continue to deliver on that, I'll happily return for more.
Rating:
Sakamoto Days is currently streaming on Netflix on Saturdays.
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