Lycoris Recoil – 08

“Another day, another dollar”

This week’s Lycoris Recoil opens Chisato up to the harsh reality that her ammo consumption makes a massive dent in LycoReco’s wallet. But as it turns out, Chisato’s got a world of shit she’s stuck in with the attention of both Majima and the Alan Institute.

MUGATU WOULD’VE BEEN PROUD

To start on a lighter note, this was the episode where the girls learn about the benefits of part-time work. It was pretty cute to see how Chisato begrudgingly cooperated with Takina when she kept pressuring her flightier friend to take budgeting seriously and mind her bullet usage. It acts as a counterbalance with all of the times Chisato urged Takina to go for non-lethal confrontation with criminals to have Takina do the same for Chisato by pushing her to use less ammunition during a fight she could easily win without it.

I also loved the payoff for Takina’s new addition to the menu with her not realizing that it went viral and was ordered often because it looks like actual crap. Where they just let Takina serve a delicious pastry that looked like a cartoon poop, and stood by her as they served it without telling her anything until she jumped to the grim realization that everyone’s been laughing at her for getting so excited about serving a poop pastry to customers.

SYMPATHY FOR THE GUY WHO MURDERS PRE-TEENS

This episode seems to want you to forget about the severity of what Majima has done by equating him with Chisato. As he visits one of her hideouts unannounced, Majima winds up trying to soul-search with her as they both happen to be part of the Alan Institute’s experiments.

I understand the kind of misdirecting they’d want to do by having Majima surprisingly be the lesser of the evils that Chisato has to face. At the same time, I could see him being a lot more sympathetic if his body count wasn’t so high. I suppose the end game for the Alan Institute is to have Chisato fall within the same blood-thirsty mindset as Majima, but with the added caveat of possibly being as easy-to-use as the green-haired dude is.

Heck, they even try to link their pasts by having Chisato be the girl who wanted to stop Majima from blowing up Tokyo Tower. I’d say Majima comes off more like a cautionary tale of what could happen to Chisato if the Alan Institute was able to manipulate her into committing acts of terror. But even with this information, it’s hard to act like them bonding over “Die Hard” and shared trauma would keep the image of Majima blowing up kids in a subway or running over a little girl and then shooting them out of viewers’ heads.

The Alan Institute come off like really annoying antagonists because of how many hands they have in the cookie jar. You get introduced to so many violent people that LycoReco have to fight, but they’re all merely just pawns compared to the folks running the show. Where it tries calling to question whether it’s worse to commit horrible deeds or to order said people to commit horrible deeds.

The Alan Institute, especially under Mr. Yoshi’s command, is revving up to turn Chisato into a killing machine. But that’s all on an interpersonal level compared to all of the domestic terrorism that’s been committed and/or condoned under their watchful eye. At this point, I’m more curious about how close Majima is to Mr. Yoshi, considering that, despite having a distant professional collaboration at the moment, Majima seems to see what the Alan Institute wants in a more bitter and cynical way considering how much they experimented on him.