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Durarara!!×2
Episode 10

by Jacob Chapman,

Well, the excitement was nice while it lasted, but it looks like Durarara!! is back to coasting around its corners on autopilot, and we all just have to deal with it.

There's nothing wrong with the content per se. The episode is easy to follow and everything is progressing naturally out of the consequences from the previous episode. It's just so hard to care with execution this limp and drifty. Shizuo is on the run from a deadly criminal syndicate after being framed for murder. Akane has a sad past behind her sad present, and feels powerless to make things right. Dotachin and Rokujo are fighting for the fate of The Dollars, since Mikado is still wrapped up in emotional paralysis over both Aoba's ultimatum and the doubt Izaya has seeded in his heart about his potential true desires. It's all big, juicy, character-driven stuff, and yet none of it has much weight. Why is that?

Well, the animation continues to slip in and out of competency, and the direction is so backseat by this point that everything is treated with the same passive non-gravity. This hands-off, paint-by-numbers style of spooning out the story stands out to me more now than it did in earlier in the season, because episodes 7-9 got away from it ever so slightly, and the difference in emotional investment was drastic. Even when the animation was running on two frames and a prayer, there was more deft delineation in tone between comedy, drama, moments of internal instability and external excitement in those most recent episodes. So when the season returns to that lackadaisical "chronological events in a planner" mood that dominated its early episodes, the ennui sets back in harder than it ever did before. That's definitely what happens in episode 10. I appreciated Akane's tragic backstory, but it was almost in spite of how it was told.

In everything that followed, as the show leapt from phone conversation to phone conversation, I found I had an incredibly hard time caring about any of it. Two episodes ago, we had a heart-stopping climax that implied a ticking clock scenario, and I cut the show some slack for following that up with one slower transition episode. But two in a row? And the second one is a meandering, almost tone-deaf series of expositions? Not cool, Durarara!! This smells like lazy adaptation, patching chapters into episodes with little regard for how the medium change affects the pacing, and it's really starting to drag.

So where does this episode ultimately leave us? Well, Masaomi has confronted Izaya about impersonating him to give Mikado dodgy advice, but seems threatened by the idea of actually clearing up this misunderstanding with his friend (again), opting to vent uselessly at Izaya instead. Akane has been set straight about Shizuo's good heart, and is already making new friends with Celty and Anri to make up for the fake friendships her yakuza family had been dooming her with. Aoba is still Schemey McSchemerPants with new schemes already forming in said pants. Then there's the Russian assassins, the biggest wildcards of this arc. Slon&Vorona have finally split up, with Slon keeping watch over their unkillable marks (Celty and Anri) while Vorona splits off to stalk Mikado and see if he's some kind of supernatural monster too. She might get to see that monstrous side of him that Izaya's been talking about, even if he is human inside and out.

It was a not-particularly-interesting transition episode with some necessary story info and a few welcome laughs, (Shooter gets sad when he realizes his headless horse-body scares little girls,) but that's about it. On a side note, I checked out the brand-spanking new simuldub for the series, and I wish it was better news to cap this review with, but...well...

If you enjoyed the first season dub of Durarara!!, this isn't really that different. All the same cast members have returned to their roles, and we haven't gotten to hear much from the new cast members yet. So if you enjoyed the first season's english dub, you'll probably enjoy season two's, but if you didn't care for it, you're really not going to like this even more stilted-sounding continuation. For my part, I was torn on the first season's dub, probably moreso than I have been on any other anime dub. The highs were high and the lows were low. I thought some parts of it were outstanding. Crispin Freeman's Shizuo, Johnny Bosch's Izaya, Bridget Hoffman's Yagiri, and especially Kari Wahlgren's Celty were perfectly cast and performed. I also thought some parts of it were unlistenable. Some members of the cast were outright painful to listen to, and from the best of what I could tell, it was all a matter of experience. The dub suffered from a bad case of hyper-literal script-itis, with poorly adapted lines that seemed nearly impossible to deliver with any kind of fidelity to character. Some of the most experienced voice actors blessed with the most intriguing characters made it out alive, and the rest did not. With competent ADR direction and a better adaptive script, the show could have had an english dub on par with the deftly handled Baccano! dub (written by the same author in the same style,) but to my ear, it was a mess sprinkled with a few gold nuggets.

Anyway, my point is that this is more of the same, but it's arguably gotten a little worse. One of the most enjoyable parts of the season one dub, Bosch's Izaya, sounds stiff and confused in this first episode of season two's dub, and so does literally everyone else except Wahlgren's Celty, who once again magically survived the maelstrom of poor direction and awkward scripting somehow, and continues to rock the part above and beyond the par for the series dub. There are a large bevy of talented voice actors in this cast, but Wahlgren is the only person that sounds like she has any idea what the context or tone of the scene is supposed to be, while everyone else stumbles over badly translated dialogue. The most awkward example of this pops up when a character with a habit of peppering his speech with Engrish is called out on his "poor grasp of the English language." In the dub, he not only speaks perfect English, but wasn't given any weird voice tic, accent, or habit whatsoever to compensate and give his "fake foreigner" schtick any new context to work with, so not only does the joke not work, but all of his scenes completely lack context. Long story short, if you dug the first season dub, this one isn't that different, and if you didn't like it, the change of ADR Director has unfortunately not made this second season dub any better.

Rating: B-

Durarara!!×2 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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