Rating: A-
Shonen action series are renowned for being stocked with characters who wear their hearts on their sleeves, and the script for Tokyo Blade emphasizes emotional acting even above and beyond that. That makes it an ideal venue for those who have issues with their acting – Melt, Akane, and Kana among them – to sort out said issues. But for all of the depth of their respective issues, none of them have as deep-seeded and fundamental a problem with their relationship to acting as the one who normally remains most aloof from such things: Aqua. But while he’s been clear from early in the series about his feelings on acting, the exact extent of his dysfunction has only been hinted at before now.
First, though, Kana’s case needs to be finished. Aqua and Akane set in motion their planned ad libbing to bolster Kana, while Taiki institutes some of his own to make sure that Akane doesn’t outshine him. The net result forces Kana to the center, to step beyond her self-proscribed role of being the play’s acting coordinator by providing support and prompting for her to do what she truly does best: dazzle with her acting. The minor problem here is the series has been here before, so this part all feels a bit retread, and so the emotional impact here is not as great. Some of Kana’s ruminations about her mother are new, but otherwise the timing here feels uncharacteristically slow. The part of this that I actually liked the most was Kaburagi’s reaction to Kana fully unleashing herself (although Akane’s fangirl reaction wasn’t bad for a bit of levity, either). No doubt the roles she gets from now on could be a bit different.
What rescues this from being a more mundane episode (by this series’ standards) is that the climax here isn’t Kana’s, but Aqua’s. The way he chose to be emotionless to counter and contrast Taiki’s highly expressive acting was an interesting dynamic, but the episode’s real meat lies in the true nature of Aqua’s panic attacks. It’s not being reminded of Ai’s death that triggers him; it’s the impurity of his motives. His life is all about avenging Ai, and his acting is a means to that end. Such a dark motivation means that having fun while acting feels like a betrayal, so he rejects that on a visceral level. His guilt (however unwarranted) over not being able to protect Ai in the end feeds into this, too, which makes his in-character ad-libbing to Kana all the more ironic and his in-character reaction to Blade’s provocations all the more devastating. The end result is that Aqua has essentially cursed himself; acting can’t be anything but an expression of pain for him. . . which is exactly the state his character is in now. How much of what we’re seeing at the end of the episode is under control and on-script, I wonder?
Setting aside how wonderfully the visuals and music come together to give that scene full impact, the other big moment here is that Taishi has figured out Aqua and Ruby’s ginormous secret, and at some level may have known it for quite some time. Akane’s intuition was just a fantasy which hit all too close to home, but Taishi knows. Granted, he’d be the most likely one to figure it out, but thaat both he and Akane have had some glimpse of the truth means that others out there are likely capable of putting the pieces together, too; I could imagine Kaburagi doing that at some point, for instance, since he knows that Ai was seeing a guy. For now, this is still a minor point, but no doubt this will come up again later on.
In all, this makes for another strong episode, if not quite on the powerhouse level of the previous three.
USA Anime 