Sabikui Bisco – 08

「外道の罠」 (Gedou no Wana)
“Fiendish Trap”

Episode 08 of Sabikui Bisco offers Milo the chance to have his bloody revenge on Kurokawa for abducting his sister and threatening to kill her if he doesn’t tell him how the Rust antidote was made. But while Milo manages to hold his own against the corrupt leader, he’ll need more help than what he bargained for when it turns out that he’s up against a former Mushroom Keeper.

STUDY HARDER, PANDA HEAD

This episode was kind of an exercise in frustration as Kurokawa was constantly THIS close to always getting killed off. Milo was awesome early on in this episode by managing to whoop Kurokawa hard enough to slash his chest and knees several times over.

Kurokawa did pull an odd countermeasure with some familiarity on what bioweapons he should protect himself against, but they really gotta stop letting their guard down, especially when the circumstances are dire and Milo’s lack of foresight gets him mind-controlled by Kurokawa’s puppetshroom. Bisco and Jabi have the same issue too when the both of them beat the tar out of Kurokawa with their intervention, but they never thought to double-tap him so they

Milo also really goofs up too when he assumes Kurokawa will be good on his promise to spare Bisco if he tells him the secret to concocting the Rust Eating Mushroom for him to create and monopolize like the epipen. Milo did such a good job at keeping everyone in the dark as he was poisoning them with the numbshroom that I honestly thought he had a plan to give him the wrong information.

Like telling him that you need to synthesize the mushroom with a difficult-to-obtain mineral. But he just gives up the ghost in a last ditch effort and then deflates hard when he realizes he’ll still have to shoot Bisco because Kurokawa barely even promised Milo that he’d spare him.

YOU JUST ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD

On a kinder note, it was a fascinating episode because of how amped up the stakes got with Bisco and Milo sharing the same room with the man who used his status as a Mushroom Keeper to experiment on people, ascend towards the higher echelons of society, and then proceed to fabricate the popular lie that Mushroom Keepers spread rust. Although Kurokawa himself is put through the wringer as everyone gets a turn at mangling him, he’s got enough cards up his sleeve that he proves to be a real pain in the ass.

It’s awesome to see how they effectively build tension around his strength of knowing enough about mushrooms to make the appropriate measures to set up situations to his liking. He ends up being a trickier villain to fight not because of any combat prowess, but because he’s shrewd enough to put the pressure on the protags as they struggle to make it past the obstacles he places in their direction.

Right when you think Milo or Bisco have him brutalized and unable to carry forward with the fraudulent power grabs he had in mind for the Rust cure, he finds a way to slip out of it and put the two through a series of life-or-death situations. It makes it all the more frustrating for them not to finish him off, but I suppose the story might’ve ended at a quicker pace if he was out of the picture this soon.

YOUR VERY OWN TUXEDO MASK

It can’t be overstated how impressive it is to see how Milo’s capable of holding his own. Not only did he catch up quickly enough to be early for Kurokawa’s set deadline, but once he pulls the numbshroom stunt, he gets in quite a few slashes on him.

I was so convinced that they were going to make Milo more helpless that I was pleasantly surprised to see how he managed to clear a room and get in some near-fatal slashes on the show’s main villain.

Even when the show stressed that teamwork is important for Milo to have survived his run-in with Kurokawa as Bisco and Jabi get involved in the fight, they did a pretty good job at making Milo very competent for a kind-hearted doctor, even if I did crack up when Kurokawa said that Bisco was Milo’s “Tuxedo Mask”.

But despite everyone’s heroics in this episode, there’s also quite a cliffhanger ahead of us as Milo is gravely wounded by several arrows to the back and Jabi winds up getting captured once again. At the moment, Bisco and Pawoo are the only two that aren’t compromised, but things are looking grim on Bisco’s end. Having to scramble to pick up the pieces, we’re left with a cliffhanger preview that only shows a green field and Bisco looking tattered-up. On a lighter note, I’m curious why the next episode is titled “I Love You” if it looks like it’ll focus on Bisco trying to keep Milo alive.