Durarara!! ×2 The Second Arc

Episode 11

Last week's episode ended with Dotachin being hospitalized after a hit-and-run. This week's episode begins with Dotachin in a full-blown coma. Things are escalating at a frightening speed, and it's time for our cast to start taking a stand, even if that means some of them must stand against their own friends. Masaomi has successfully begun tying the Yellow Scarves back together. Walker and Saburo are considering an alliance with them, at the very least committing to hunt for Dotachin's attacker personally. (Erika is more level-headed, resolving to stay by Dotachin's side until he wakes up and resist her immense temptation toward revenge. Good for her! Anri really needs someone to lean on right now.)

Worst of all, Shizuo may have been arrested in the fallout of his anger over the assault, which means that The Dollars have now lost two of their three most famous and valuable members. As Shinra explains, Shizuo was Team Dad for The Dollars, the pillar of physical support, and Dotachin was Team Mom, the pillar of psychological support. Now that both of these moderating figures have been forcibly removed from the picture, all that remains is Celty, the blank symbol of untapped potential. The bad news is that she's already considering an alliance with Aoba.

This arc of Durarara!! is not playing around. At long last, I think we're really setting up for the climactic endgame.

By the way, this episode finally delivered on Aoba asking Celty for her e-mail. I'd been wondering about that tantalizing detail for six whole episodes! Unsurprisingly, Aoba just asked Celty for her digits because he wanted to try and sway her to his side after he was positive he had Mikado in the bag. Dotachin and Shizuo's erasure from the Ikebukuro equation has accelerated this process, so Celty agrees to meet with Aoba and Mikado to discuss the future of The Dollars. They meet in a dingy warehouse where Mikado cracks off arguably the most chilling line to ever come out of his mouth:

"Well, if Shizuo was arrested, it's a good thing he left The Dollars before it happened. In a way, I'm glad about Kyohei too. If he knew what I was about to do, he would stop me for sure."

Wow, Mikado. No consideration for the safety of a man who has literally saved your life on multiple occasions. Minimal consideration for the life of a guy who went to bat for you when The Dollars were just about to fall apart. All that matters is that their decisions (or even tragic circumstances like being run over by a van) don't tarnish the reputation of your new Spotless Dollars. You are the cancer that is killing The Dollars, Mikado. It's YOOOOUUUU.

Now that the first Durarara!! novel has been officially translated into English, it's become clear to me that the anime was doing Mikado's character a disservice from the very beginning. In the novel, Mikado's fascinating and twisted psyche is relegated entirely to internal monologue, creating a unique juxtaposition between his everyman outer self and his untapped delusions of grandeur within. There's this unspoken tension between Mikado chapters where you're just waiting to see when the dark temptations inside him will finally sprout into something, and every new interaction he has with Izaya seems like he's playing with fire. In the anime, which is edited much differently from the source books and relies on multiple narrators to illustrate scenes, sometimes even using characters that are completely divorced from the episode they're narrating, this secret depth of Mikado's doesn't really come across. His temptations only become clear when he begins to act on them, here at the end of the entire story. Durarara!! the TV series is more about Ikebukuro as a character with complex organisms living inside it, while Durarara!! the novel series seems to be more about characters colliding in Ikebukuro and trying to paint the city whatever color they perceive it to be in their own warped mind. So I consider this a pretty significant fault of adaptation in developing the show's protagonist, but at least they're delivering the full Mikado that Narita intended to the audience now. Better late than never.

Anyway, just like last week, this episode is mostly setup for the arc finale, but it's a far stronger entry because it relies entirely on the feelings and motivations of the characters we've known the longest: the central players of Durarara!!. There are also plenty of great character-revealing lines like Aoba's killer observation: "I'm seeing a part of Mikado that's broken. I don't know if it was broken before, or if we broke it ourselves. But this broken part of him is the perfect place for us to hide." (He makes this observation while the group is literally meeting inside an abandoned, dingy parking garage. Subtle.) Everything has come down to the core beliefs of the most powerful personalities in the story and how they will choose to act against one another. It's a mellow episode, but it's everything Durarara!! should be at its strongest.

Celty isn't the only new face to crash the Blue Blood Cells party in this episode, however. Perhaps as part of his plan, Izaya has spilled every last bean about Mikado to Akabayashi, so the one-eyed hitman appears before the group to put the fear of Awakusu into them. Since Celty's there, I'm not worried about anyone getting hurt, but Aoba's pants-wetting expression upon seeing Akabayashi is pretty great. Every episode should shoot a little fear down Aoba's spine as he continues to get too big for his britches. I guess we'll find out the results of this meeting next time.

More importantly, one of Durarara!!'s major characters has finally reached the end of her journey. Thanks to his contract with Yodogiri Jinnai, Namie's horrible old uncle has come back for Celty's head, which puts Namie herself in imminent danger now that Izaya has confiscated the cranium instead. Jinnai's secretary, Kasane Kujiragi, accompanies the old buzzard to Namie's place, and Namie recognizes her with terror. So this "secretary" is definitely an infamous presence, and I wouldn't be surprised if she controlled Jinnai herself to some degree. I'm sure once we learn more about her, we'll learn more about Jinnai's full motivations. Anyway, I said a couple weeks ago that Namie Yagiri's role in the story was over, and I specifically phrased it like this:

I'm quoting that here because I really was just spitting into the wind. I hadn't spoiled myself on anything, and I'm waiting to read the novels as they're released by Yen Press. I certainly didn't expect them to literally kill Namie off, after driving her insane, by using her pharmaceutical company ties against her! Kujiragi incapacitates Namie, her uncle gives a murderous grin, Namie futilely threatens her uncle with horrible graphic torture, the camera cuts away to an abandoned umbrella, and the narrator then casually informs us that she was never seen again. Damn, that's cold! Mind you, Namie may not be literally dead, but she's definitely story-dead, and that's essentially the same thing. Even if she wasn't murdered, she can't have any active role in the events to come if she's never seen in Ikebukuro again. She's been plucked from Durarara!!'s web of intrigue and tossed into the invisible storm. Obviously, I'm torn about this. It was definitely her time to exit the story, and I think it's hard to deny that she'd done all she could do as a character short of romancing Izaya (and let's just not go there), but she deserved a better send-off than that. Maybe we'll see exactly what happened to her next week and get some catharsis, but that narration seemed to be shutting the book on her character. That's too bad. Bye bye, Namie! You sure were crazy-pants.

The last thing that happens in this episode is that Izaya gets hacked. Someone claiming to be Kanra (his handle in the Dollars chatroom) is pinning the hit-and-run he organized on the Yellow Scarves. This doesn't seem to bother him, so I guess it doesn't contrast too badly with whatever he has planned. I don't know exactly who is impersonating Izaya, but my best guess is that it's one of Jinnai's people. They could have gotten access to Izaya's accounts from Namie before they sent her to sleep with the fishes. In any case, this episode only left me wanting more. Very bad things are happening to all our favorite characters, and I want to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon. Of course, I expect it to get much darker before the sun comes back out again, and this cour will probably end in the pit of despair for at least a few characters in Durarara!!'s city-sized cast.

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.