[Fish Sandwich]

I think this is an episode of ZEZTZ I wouldn't have cared for if I still thought about ZEZTZ the way I did for most of last year, but I guess I really have adjusted to this show's whole rhythm, because I kinda loved this one?

And you know, it's difficult to properly quantify that, in terms that would be understood by anyone who's in that position I was. This is another episode where a lot of things happen -- concepts are introduced, concepts are moved forward, but almost none of those concepts are resolved. There's a fundamental ZEZTZ-ness to this episode in that way. The show will tell you a whole lot, but it puts most of the burden of making sense of it on the viewer. (For example, even though I still don't know what this all means, I'm happy the episode seemingly validates my assumption that a lot of the abstract stuff in the first episode will turn out to be more than random, given stuff like Baku's arm melting the same way as when the Gun Nightmare was taunting him.)

Why I think that honestly works great here, and why I've started to believe it maybe does work in general for this series, is that the confusion a viewer is liable to feel about the details is directly reflected in Baku's whole journey, and that does have the effect of making him easier to identify with. There's no obvious right path for him to follow that we can see, the same way he can't see it either. Instead, this episode piles on the pressure, forcing his hand and ultimately leaving him dealing with the consequences of his actions in a way that's probably better than continuing to do nothing at all... but it doesn't seem very good, either, does it? He once again faces down the fears deep in his subconscious mind to gain new power, but the thing that gets him there seems like a broken Baku retreating into his identity as a mere number, which would mean he's also avoiding those inconvenient truths again. Yet another contradiction.

So yeah, I can't exactly say how all these ideas will ultimately feed into the larger narrative yet (and I mean, this *is* technically only the first half of an episode block), but I really like all those ideas, and I really like the way it's all presented. Especially NOX's brutal executions with a realistic handgun, which seems like the kind of thing you'd have to really fight the censors about nowadays to even do indirectly like that! The show held off on doing more action in the real world for a long time, and I definitely think they made this episode feel appropriately huge in its stakes to go with that.