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Durarara!! ×2 The Second Arc
Episodes 1-3

by Jacob Chapman,

How would you rate episode 1 of
Durarara!!×2 Ten ?
Community score: 3.9

How would you rate episode 2 of
Durarara!!×2 Ten ?
Community score: 4.0

How would you rate episode 3 of
Durarara!!×2 Ten ?
Community score: 4.2

After a three-month vacation, Durarara has finally returned. Good on you for taking a break, DRRR! You were beginning to let yourself go...

Yes, last winter's return to the series after five years of hiatus was both exciting and disappointing. While the writing felt the same thanks to the consistency of the light novel source material, the show's tone, direction, and pacing just weren't what they had been before. The final nail in the coffin was the production, as the show went from its attractive-though-not-impressive status quo at Brains Base to barely animated scribblings in the shift to Studio Shuka. Unfortunately, as the show comes back for summer to adapt another batch of books, that last part hasn't changed. While these first three episodes look significantly better than the rock-bottom episodes at the tail end of the last arc, it's still going to be a rougher experience than it was in its first season way back when. Fortunately, everything else that dragged the production down seems to have risen anew from the ashes. Durarara is finally back on top of its game again, with two of its most gruesome character revelations yet in two sharp and captivating episodes. (I already wrote up my thoughts on the recap-heavy but surprisingly good first episode.)

From what I understand, volume 7 of the 13-book Durarara series was mostly side stories, and since "The Second Arc" (more like the fifth or sixth, but I'm not naming these seasons) has reached this point, these episodes are more standalone and introspective than the recent helter-skelter plot-tangles. Thank god. Most people fell in love with the world of Durarara!! through the one-character-per-episode focus of the show's beginning, so a return to that formula feels long overdue. Even better, these two episodes focus on two very different and very secretive characters that we haven't gotten to know yet: Mika Harima and Mizuki Akabayashi.

First, the story of Mika. She's been getting closer and closer to Seiji Yagiri every day, and Seiji's obsessive sister Namie has finally had enough. The plan was to distract Seiji from his infatuation with Celty's head by giving him a placebo. He's not supposed to fall in love with the placebo instead. After one too many damning reports of lovey-dovey behavior from the Orihara twins, Namie decides that since she brought Mika into this world, it's time to take her out. (We don't learn much about the Orihara twins this week, but it is fascinating that they truly don't seem to care if their brother lives or dies. Is that why Izaya hates them? He thrives on the attention of others, even if it's hatred, so does their reliance on one another and complete apathy towards him get under his skin? It's an interesting tangent, but this episode isn't about the Oriharas, so we'll leave it at that for now.)

Since Izaya wouldn't approve of using Celty's head for negotiation outside of his control, Namie can only act now, while he's recovering in the hospital from a serious stabbing. She calls Mika about wanting to entrust the head to her care, since it's "too dangerous" for Namie to be in possession of it anymore. Of course, this is a lie. She plans to coerce Shinra into performing another "special surgery" with Mika and the head to jerk Seiji's affections back to square one, but the plan gets a lot weirder when Mika shows up to the rendezvous point with a garden trowel. "What's that for?" Namie wonders. I wasn't ready for the answer.

Mika's resolve has been strengthened by Seiji's reciprocated love, and she's decided to fight back. If Namie wants the head hidden away for good, she'll get the job done by scooping out its brains and consuming Celty's head bite after squishy bite. (This is the part where you run from the TV screaming.) The circle will be complete! The head will finally be a part of her and her devotion to Seiji will be irrefutable! IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE. RIGHT?

So with her scheme freshly jettisoned out the window, Namie decides to just disfigure Mika's face with chemicals instead. And hey, if a little acid on her face kills the girl in the process, oh well, at least Namie can get her brother back without losing Celty's head. Once again, she makes the mistake of asking questions with a good old-fashioned "Any last words?" Mika has lots of last words, in fact. Mika's last words are every devastating secret and major plot revelation from the series to date, delivered straight to Namie's shocked face. (This is an awfully italics-heavy review.)

Yes, the whole time we thought Mika was a spaced-out doll hanging off Seiji's arm, she's been watching and listening. Her obsession with Seiji, loving him, protecting him, and consuming every part of his life, even the parts he didn't know were there, have led her to long sleepless nights of surveillance and investigation. She knows the identities and secret lives of everyone in the chatroom. She knows what the major forces in control of the city are planning, and in some cases she even knows why. Since all of Ikebukuro is connected, all of this powerful information spun out from a simple strand: Seiji, to Namie, to Izaya, to everyone else. Mika's supposedly empty head is full of secrets!

Namie reels from the surprise just long enough for Seiji, the one with the actual pea-sized brain in the relationship, to show up and reprimand her, "punishing" her with a kiss, since he saw her kissing Mika. (Being bone-stupid, he doesn't understand the significance behind the original act or what effect repeating it would have, but it definitely gets the job done.) This finally pushes Namie over the edge and she retreats in a flurry of confused emotions. There's barely enough time to process it before we're off to episode 3.

Next is the story of Akabayashi. Unlike Mika, he's such a new character that the audience might not care about him at all, but that will definitely change over the next twenty minutes. As we saw last season, he's like an uncle to Akane Awakusu, and seems very invested in protecting her from the cruelty surrounding her mob family. So when she begs him to show her how to win in a fight to the death, he's not really sure how to respond. (Akane's adventures with Shizuo seem to have given her newfound bravado.)

Akabayashi may be a hardened mafia man himself, but he doesn't want Akane to join that world, and he has the same strong feelings about Anri Sonohara for some reason. Why her? Well, before he worked for the Awakusu family, he was a yakuza tough, trading drugs and threatening unlucky locals for protection money. One of these families was the Sonoharas, and Akabayashi got a nasty surprise when he ran into Anri's mother instead of her father on collection night. He was immediately struck by her savage beauty, and before he could even try to defend himself, Anri's mother sliced him across the face in full-on Saika mode. Saika's violent-love-zombification (for lack of a better term, Durarara!! is weird like that) immediately started flooding his system, but he didn't want any of it. He only wanted to retain his newfound feelings for Anri's mother, so while the curse was overtaking his body, he reached into his eye socket and wrenched out his eyeball, successfully removing the infection and grossing out the audience. In yet another case of Ryohgo Narita's trademark twisted-romance, Akabayashi confessed his love for Anri's mother right there on the spot, blood still pouring out of the hole in his face. With Saika's lust quelled for a few quiet moments, Anri's mother accepted his feelings but then gently turned him down. After all, she was already married and had a child...

Fans of the series already know where this is going, but this episode gives us a fuller picture of Anri's childhood tragedy. Anri's father became abusive after the stress from his struggling business pushed him to get hooked on the local syndicate's mind-altering drug, and when he turned violent against his daughter, Anri's mother could no longer keep Saika's passionate feelings in check, killing her husband and then killing herself to protect her child. It's still a mystery whether Akabayashi knows that Anri is Saika's new host or not, but he knows his syndicate was responsible for killing the woman he loved and orphaning her daughter, so he lives his life trying to make up for it in whatever little ways he can. In his repressed grief and rage, he allows his yakuza boss to be killed by another relative of an addict seeking revenge, and then spends his free time with Awakusu eliminating any drug traders (and their product) that he runs across. He hates drugs, and he hates all the "what-ifs" he left smoldering in the past, but he still believes he can protect the innocent young girls left behind. It's too bad they're not as innocent as he thinks they are.

There were rocky production issues as always with these episodes, and the density of Durarara's later-stage material will probably never go away. Still, if you can follow all the flashbacks and flash-forwards, and if you can overlook a healthy handful of bad drawings, Durarara!! ×2 The Second Arc is starting out strong, and I'm happy to be excited about Narita's crazy-ass story again. I'm eager to see where the main story will go as we round the halfway point of the series, but these side story episodes were so good, I wouldn't mind a few more one-character adventures instead.

Rating: B+

Durarara!! ×2 The Second Arc is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.


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