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91 Days
Episode 11

by Gabriella Ekens,

How would you rate episode 11 of
91 Days ?
Community score: 4.7

The day of reckoning has come for the Vanetti family. Having painstakingly acquired the means to enact his revenge, Avilio has finally discovered the guts to go through with it. All it took was being coerced into killing Corteo, the last person for whom he had any human affection. Now our hero truly has no reason left to live. Still, the weight of what he's about to do appears to be taking a psychological toll on him, as evidenced by the dark shadows beneath his thousand-yard stare, as well as the occasional hallucinations of his bestie looking upon him fondly. Uncle Ganzo, the man behind the letter, has arranged for Avilio to assassinate Nero and Don Vincent during a performance at Lawless's grandiose playhouse – which, coincidentally, happens to take place 91 Days after Avilio arrived in town.

Of course it's a bloodbath, and Uncle Ganzo was an idiot to think that he could get the better of both the Galassias and Avilio. I guess he couldn't resist the allure of the Don lifestyle. The plan is for some Galassia men and Avilio to take out the Don's hulking bodyguard, Del Toro, who's standing in front of their specially-made bulletproof booth. Then, presumably, Avilio would have convinced Nero to open the door and shot them all dead. Unfortunately, it works out a little differently when a suspicious Barbero trails Avilio and catches him with his knife eight inches into Del Toro's stomach. He's captured and interrogated by Barbero, who's grown from loving to hating Nero over the course of the past few episodes. Barbero amounts to Nero's version of Corteo – a loyal childhood friend who gets overshadowed by their buddy's best new murder pal. He'd grown jealous, so he refuses to summon Nero out of fear that he wouldn't have the heart to kill Avilio. He brings in Ganzo instead, which becomes his fatal mistake. At the first chance he gets, Don Wannabe shoots Barbero in the head. By the time Nero arrives on the scene, Avilio has been let go and Barbero's murder has been attributed to him. Nero reads the letter, realizes what's happening, and rushes to beat Avilio to the Don's box, but it's too late. Avilio's already been ushered inside by Don Galassia, who was in on the whole plot. Avilio performs his whole Inigo Montoya routine for Don Vincent, but right as he's bracing for death, Avilio shoots Don Galassia instead of him. He then exits the booth, leaving Don Vincent alive.

He doesn't survive for long, though. Rather than play into both Ganzo and the Galassia family's schemes, it looks like Avilio decided to wreck everything for both of them and hope that his enemies will be taken out in the ensuing chaos. He gets two out of three. Upon realizing that Don Galassia is dead, his heir Strega executes Ganzo on the spot. As for Don Vincent, his Convenient Anime Disease kills him while he's rushing out of the room, giving him just enough time to die in his son's arms. Pretty much every named character in this show is either already dead or doomed, with the exception of Cerotto, who stopped showing up a few episodes back, and Strega, whose prognosis looks bad if he decides to keep interacting with Avilio.

Thematically, this episode mostly served to weave the theme of broken friendships in a couple more times. During a hospice visit from Nero, Don Vincent reveals that Testa Lagusa, Avilio's father, was his best friend, and that he's plagued by regret over what he did to him. Nero smooths those feelings over, saying that his father did everything for the family, and that nothing – not even friendship or familial love – should stand in the way of the Vanetti family's prestige. It's an unnatural thing for someone as people-oriented as Nero to say, but he has had to kill his own brother by this point, so I guess it's been hammered into him by his mafia upbringing. Either way, his inability to be truly ruthless in the face of friendship ultimately damns him, since he proved unwilling to eliminate Avilio until it was too late. The episode also solidified Barbero's role as a foil to Corteo, right before he was taken out. RIP Mr. Blond Glasses Man. You meant the best. (For Nero. Not for anyone else.)

It looks like they were hoarding all of the animation quality for this episode. Hopefully it'll extend into the finale as well. The animation was quite nice, and the direction was on point as usual in its suspenseful mimicry of classic gangster films. It doesn't quite reach the heights of the eighth episode's concluding sequence, but it's still a standout part of the show as a whole.

We're on the penultimate episode, and 91 Days has yet to make any significant missteps as an ambitious production from a fledgling studio and a production staff of mostly unknowns. It's been a great ride, and I'm excited to see how it ends. It looks like we're about to get that confrontation from the promotional posters, where Nero and Avilio confront each other while sitting at a table. I'm betting right now that this confrontation will take place in Avilio's childhood home. 91 Days hasn't been skimping on opportunities to punch its viewers in the soul lately, and that setting seems like it'd be conducive to the most pathos. That's all I want out of this finale – bloody, bleeding, blood-red pathos. With extra blood.

Grade: A

91 Days is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.


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