Taboo Tattoo

Episode 9

To say that this episode is an improvement over Taboo Tattoo's last couple of incredibly underwhelming entries might be damning this show with faint praise, but at this point I'll take what I can get. This flashback episode had one job, which was to tell a coherent story revolving around BB, one of the most underdeveloped characters on the show. Technically speaking, if we're going by the absolute lowest qualifiers of success, it got the job done.

I don't envy this episode, to be honest. Taboo Tattoo's plot is so muddled that it would take an entire series worth of flashback episodes to fix its problems, so it's understandable that the show doesn't even try. It simply opts to show how BB wound up getting involved with Princess Arya's Band of Brahman, while teasing out little morsels of backstory along the way. The storyline almost gets compelling when we see the moral grey area surrounding Arya and her father's decisions. We know that Arya is capable of monstrous things, but she does seem genuinely interested in restoring some liberties to her country that the king is currently denying. Meanwhile, it's clear that the king recognizes how dangerous Arya is, but BB discovers that the king crossed his own share of lines when it came to developing the tattoo technology. None of these revelations go beyond surface level exposition, but there are hints at a more fleshed-out conflict that remind you of this series' potential.

Learning about Arya's many "sisters," who are essentially clones but also not clones according to the show, also provides a modicum of dimension to the malicious princess. She's treated like a tool, literally the product of R&D with an end goal in mind that has nothing to do with her own personal desires. This puts a lot of her decisions in a slightly more empathetic light. We still don't know exactly what she plans to do when she gets the power to rewrite the world, but now we know a little more about why she might want to do that in the first place. It's only one minor step in the long process of getting Taboo Tattoo to tell a comprehensible story, but it's a step all the same. Credit where credit is due, the show is trying.

It's actually kind of a shame to see the script working so hard to pick up the slack this week, because the direction is probably the weakest it has ever been up to this point. The entire episode is shot so blandly, and the action feels so perfunctory, that it takes whatever "oomph" the script might have provided and deflates it completely. The two fight scenes we get this week against one of Arya's "sisters" are completely shoehorned into the plot, and neither of them are any good at all. The lazy and arbitrary shot composition muddles the choreography and dilutes any drama that might have been wrung from the story. If this script had been shot with the energy of the first few episodes, it might have been a return to form for Taboo Tattoo; as it is, it just feels boring and lifeless.

I didn't hate this episode. That isn't the greatest compliment a show can receive, but I have to show some mercy whenever I can. Even if BB will never be anything more than a cardboard cutout cliche of a character, he was given more to do this week than in the three weeks leading up to his unceremonious death. I have a hard time seeing how any of this information will be dramatically important to Seigi and Izzy's lives in the present, but I'm taking Taboo Tattoo one week at a time. Next week may find the show relapsing back into bad habits, but this week gave us a competent story that was only slightly-less-than-competently-told. Asking for much more than that from Taboo Tattoo is setting yourself up to be disappointed.

Rating: C-

Taboo Tattoo is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.