Sakamoto Days

Episode 8

It's time for another round of Sakamoto Saturdays, as Shin and Sakamoto continue their efforts to rescue Xiaotang. Between getting a little more on Shin's backstory and a couple more cool fights, there are a lot of moving parts to this one, and most of it manages to land pretty well. At the same time, a lot of it feels purely functional, and compared to some of the crazier stuff we got last week, this episode didn't leave a strong impression.

As Xiaotang attempts to escape, she learns that she's been trapped in the same cell as Asakura, the researcher in charge of running the Lab. When Xiaotang tries to grill him for information, we learn a little more about his connection to Shin and how he obtained his powers. It turns out that rather than being a guinea pig, Shin was brought to the Lab by a man named Ando who Asakura used to work with. As Shin spent more time around Asakura, he started to get more interested in his research on developing superhuman powers and got caught up in Asakura's belief that it could someday help people. One night, Shin accidentally mistakes an experimental potion for juice and gains his telepathic powers, but rather than seeing it as a way to help their research, Asakura and the other researchers find his new powers to be creepy instead of helpful. After feeling betrayed, Shin left them to strike out on his own and eventually found his way into Sakamoto's employ. However, while Asakura feels as though he abandoned Shin and burdened him with a curse, Xiaotang points out to him that Shin doesn't think of his powers that way, and with how much pride Shin takes in his abilities, we can see that Asakura and the others still mean a lot to him. I can't say this backstory quite managed to pull at my heartstrings, but it was nice to see that Shin was a normal kid once, and it's easier to see now why he's so sensitive about having his powers insulted.

Meanwhile, Sakamoto and Shin continue their fight with the mad scientist assassin, who uses one of his experiments to scramble their brain signals and try to make them attack each other. While the two of them are skilled enough to work around this handicap, it does end up slowing down their reaction time just enough to make their attacks ineffective. Thankfully they manage to come up with their own novel solution: namely Sakamoto swinging at Shin while the latter reads his mind so he can dodge Sakamoto's attacks and have them hit the scientist instead. It's pretty fun. While the fight isn't visually that good, it's still pretty nice to see the show getting more clever with how they play out. There's also a good bit of novelty in seeing a character voiced by Matt Mercer dishing out punches like Star Platinum, and considering this is probably the closest anything in Sakamoto Days has felt to Jojo's fight, I did at least get a pretty good chuckle out of that. 

With the mad scientist out of the way, Sakamoto and Shin continue to search for Xiaotang but get separated when Sakamoto accidentally falls down a trap door, Looney Tunes style. This happens to land him right in the middle of a confrontation between the deer guy, Kashima, and two members of the order named Shishiba and Osaragi who are looking to grill him for answers about Slur. Aside from discovering that Kashima is less of a Deer guy and more of a Deer Cyborg, there isn't too much out of the ordinary here by the show's usual standards. It was cute seeing Osaragi being distracted from fighting because she noticed how much Sakamoto resembles a cuddly teddy bear. As for Shin, he ends up being targeted by the invisible assassin named Seba that he squared off with last week, and finds that his telepathy isn't very useful when he can't see where attacks are coming from. The fight itself isn't particularly exciting so far, but I did at least sympathize with Seba's desire to punch out before his shift is over and try to end the fight as quickly as possible to avoid clocking in any overtime. But just when Seba thinks he's done for the day Shin manages to get some timely assistance from Heisuke, who manages to track them down after seeing Hana cry about how everyone vanished on her. Sadly, the episode ends before either fight can wrap up, so there isn't really much else to talk about here. Still, there's nothing wrong with what is ultimately a perfectly functional episode of Sakamoto Days, and with how quickly this show tends to escalate, I imagine it won't be long before it manages to throw out another fun swerve.

Rating: 3.6

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Sakamoto Days is currently streaming on Netflix on Saturdays.