[Switchblade]

This arc had me thinking about The Little Sister, the fifth of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels and the one that's often cited as being the most cynical and misanthropic. I won't give away too much, but it ends with Marlowe confronting the real culprit behind the book's crimes and realizing that he can't prove it, meaning that they're going to get away with everything they've done. On the way out of the building, he passes by another character from the story who's pretty clearly on their way to kill the aforementioned culprit. Marlowe just lets him walk on by and keeps going about his day.

I was thinking about this a lot as I watched Shotaro trying to save the gangsters who ran over the sister. Marlowe, at least in that novel, wouldn't have gone out of his way to try to save those guys while Shotaro dives onto that foreign model car (a term that, as an American, amuses the hell out of me to see applied to a fucking Chevy Trailblazer) because he doesn't want to see even a criminal get hurt.

So half-boiled.