[Fish Sandwich]

I feel like Jin's role as the primary exposition-giver on this show is a real statement about this show's stance on exposition in general. It's almost begrudging, you know? Like, you'll get your minute or two of Q&A time, and then that hood goes back up, and you all have to leave the dull and depressing prison dimension to go back to the fun colorful adventures you're supposed to be having.

Because of that, it was honestly a bit shocking to see the series be willing to give this coherent an explanation of what's going on, and at that length to boot. I mean, I knew who the Nouto were and the respective obsessions that define that trio's interest in humanity, but up until now, that was mostly because I read info about the show elsewhere. Granted, you know, the very first thing Sonoi ever did was recite poetry, so it's not like there isn't room for the viewer to guess at these things, but still. It would probably be showing a little too much faith in the audience to expect them to put all these puzzle pieces together on their own, and much like Jin recognizes here that it's a bit early to expect the Donbrothers to just go along with everything without knowing why (or what, or how, or who...) you can sort of see Inoue at the rest of the show's staff coming to the understanding that it might be alright to throw the audience a bone after a month.

The real beauty of it is, with the way Donbrothers is set up, you could spend the entire run-time of the episode doing nothing but answering questions, and there'd still be countless more to ask. So it's not really sacrificing the unique flavor of the show to finally tell us explicitly what the villains are called, for example, because, I mean, can the Nouto even be called villains, exactly? Is the conflict truly that clean? I joke about Jin's exposition being this begrudging thing he doesn't care for, but given the visual of him as this dejected prisoner in a cell who always mentions how they've hit their time limit for conversation that day, he's probably got an actual reason he literally can't talk with them more, right? What the heck actually happened to him in-between raising a young Tarou and now? What the heck is a Donbrothers!? What's Kaito's deal? ...No, but I mean, what IS an administrator, in this context?

You get the idea. Or rather, we don't get these ideas, yet, and that's part of what makes Donbrothers so compelling. It's a sort of storytelling than can run the risk of becoming grating if it goes on for long enough, but this show is working hard to earn good faith, and I already doubt it's going to squander that by the end.

And a huge part of why is that, despite this being the episode about exposition, it's also yet another fantastic standalone narrative that gives us meaningful and interesting character drama, in the here and now, and that stuff is so human that it doesn't require months of piecemeal explanations to grasp. Tsuyoshi's angst about his marriage was explored in a really fun way here. The writing in this show is insanely sharp, so it really only takes that one scene in the taxi to get a handle on what's going through his head. There's not a line of dialogue that goes to waste (even the cab driver's single quip is another pointed barb for poor Tsuyoshi), and that efficiency frees the rest of the episode up to take this story and turn it into something that... well, that it's actually possible to imagine a small child enjoying, to be blunt about it? Like, it's an episode where Kiji Brother lets his newfound self-confidence go to his head, and learns his lesson, and despite the unusually mature setup, that broad plot is going to be easy to digest for all ages, which is important to get right.

It all wraps up in a really sweet way, with a bit of a moral about Being Yourself and all that, which is great, and in that process, we also get a lot of material with Tarou that I loved even more. His conversations with Tsuyoshi have loads more stellar dialogue, with particular favorites for me being his observation that the two of them are alike, and the very end where he says Tsuyoshi won their contest. The latter is easy to explain. I like how it highlights that Tarou, despite being Mr. Perfect, is clearly painfully aware of the distance that puts between him and the average person, and how even a guy like Tsuyoshi can easily surpass him when it comes to certain things. Much like there are no small jobs or big jobs to him, I'd imagine Tarou doesn't see himself as superior to anyone just because he's got his talents. And now that I think about it, I guess all of this gets at why I like the former line so much, too. Pointing out that Tarou and Tsuyoshi both lack a real specialty maybe highlights this line of thinking. Despite the reasons given sounding completely opposed, when you boil it down, Tsuyoshi doesn't have a specialty as a result of his flaws as a person, and the same is true of Tarou. Being Mr. Perfect makes him imperfect in his own right.

There's more about that exchange I still don't feel like I can put into words, but I don't know, there's some food for thought, I guess. Donbrothers seems to give me a lot of that every week. I wonder if I'll ever actually talk about an action scene in-depth before the show ends...?