Durarara!! ×2 The Second Arc

Episode 8

How would you rate episode 8 of
Durarara!!×2 Ten ?

Community score: 4.1

Now yes, this plot point was technically introduced at the end of episode 7, while episode 8 details this new group's early exploits. (Let's call them the Izaya Friends Club for now, since that's how their glorious leader refers to them.) There was just too much going on in last week's writeup to cover the stinger, and this episode focuses entirely on Izaya, so I didn't mind putting it off. Anyway, there are a lot of familiar faces here, but none of them are given much fanfare, so after a little episode-scrubbing, I arrived at a tidy list:

• The Dragon Zombies, a gang of five or so masked toughs who used to run rampant all over Ikebukuro back in the day, but apparently cleared out in recent years. Dotachin recognizes them on sight but Celty does not, which means they must have been a presence in the city a fairly long time ago and/or Dotachin had some involvement with them. Either way, they're new faces to the audience, unlike most of the other foes listed below.
• Manami Mamiya, the "nobody" who failed to assassinate Izaya in the hospital, thus giving him his epiphany. I can't imagine what he could have said to draw her to his side, but this is Izaya we're talking about, so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.
• Haruna Niekawa, the not-Saika from the Saika Arc. She had a subplot about her detective father trying to make amends, and she thought she was the true owner of Saika, so she went a little nutso when she found out it was really Anri. Yeah, I almost forgot about her too.
• Sloan is basically in traction after his "punishment" from Akabayashi, but he still made it to this evil meeting. Seems like potentially bad news for Varona.
• Ruri's stalker is passed out on the floor, so I'm not sure he can be called a voluntary member, but since he's given an ominous introduction shot, I have to assume he'll be joining Izaya's Friends Club either by will or by force when he wakes up.
• Some unknown bald guy who looks very unimpressed with all of this, who we later learn is named Kine.
• Another unknown fellow with a winning smile, intense burn scars across his face, and a big-ass hammer in his hands. I say unknown because I had to watch the episode twice before I finally figured it out: holy crap, it's Aoba's crazy brother! I honestly thought maybe he was dead or something. Well, that's not good!
• Mikage Sharaku, the sister of the Orihara twins' martial arts teacher, who was the guy predominantly responsible for outing Ruri's stalker when he joined the Dollars chatroom. Apparently, she and Izaya have some romantic history or something that resulted in her dropping out of high school. Also, she has savage abs (pictured above).
• If Namie Yagiri counts, of course she's there for the evil-meetings too. (Is there anything more to do with that character at this point? Besides drive her tragically insane or use her evil pharmaceutical company ties as a plot point somewhere else?)

So that's the evil crew. What are they planning to do? Your guess is as good as mine, because I've become pretty skittish about making the same guess over and over.

See, one of my greatest crosses to bear as a Durarara!! fan has always been my poor understanding of its intended pace and structure. Ever since Celty's head was cemented as The MacGuffin That Could End The World at the end of the first "book" (and we are now on book 9 out of 13), I kept falling for Ryohgo Narita's red-herring climaxes, because until very recently, I didn't know exactly how long the series was and how much of it would be macro-climax and denouement. I thought Izaya would move to incite his Valhalla war during the Yellow Scarves Arc (end of first season) but that didn't happen. I thought he was planning to weaponize Shizuo in preparation for this war during the Akane Arc (middle of previous cour), but that didn't happen either. So just when I'd finally accepted that much of Durarara!!'s fun comes from its constant fakeouts and anticlimaxes, this episode comes along and convinces me all over again that no, for really reals this time, I think Izaya is finally making his move to incite the Valhalla war. (Just wait, I'll be wrong about it this time too!)

So even though I do think Izaya is finally making his apocalypse bid now, I still have no idea how or why he chose this group of people to do it with, because even inside of one episode, the show once again pretzels your expectations and predictions back on themselves before you even realize what happened. Durarara!! is very good at what it does, but it can be mentally exhausting to follow, and there are definitely times where I wish this continuation could be paced as leisurely as that first season was. Oh well, looks like we get to blitz forward at lightspeed to the end instead!

The episode's story is so simple that I can easily fit it in one paragraph. Our good friend shifty Shiki asks Izaya to investigate an illegal gambling ring, Amphisbaena, and a group of drug smugglers, Heaven's Slave. He believes these two groups are in cahoots and operating on Awakusu turf, and he also seems to think Izaya would already know something about both organizations for reasons outside of his job as an information broker. Izaya infiltrates Amphisbaena as a captive while simultaneously luring Heaven's Slave to their base, blows the lid off their hideout with the help of the Izaya Friends Club and their myriad scary powers, and goes home happy without letting Shiki in on whatever made infiltrating both groups so easy.

It's not the story that's complicated in this case, it's the plot. I didn't notice it during the Akane Arc, but apparently the "Izaya" who told Akane to eliminate Shizuo was not actually the real Izaya. This episode makes that clear when Shiki deliberately drops Izaya off in front of Akane to observe her reaction. (The implication seems to be that if Izaya really was responsible for all that insanity in the Akane Arc, then friendly relations be damned, Orihara would be wearing concrete shoes inside of 24 hours.) Luckily for Izaya, Akane reacts as though she's never met him before, because she hasn't. Turns out Izaya sent a messenger pretending to be him in his place for just such an occasion, to avoid destroying his ties with the Awakusu group (and waking up at the bottom of the ocean) should they ever find out he put those ideas into Akane's head.

So what's the point of all this? Well, the point is to confuse us about the identity of the person Amphisbaena has captured, burlap-sacked, and started (gently) torturing. Right away, the audience doesn't want to assume it's Izaya, because Izaya isn't stupid enough to be captured, and he's not humble enough to shiver and shirk the way he does when Amphisbaena's Madame Earthworm starts teasing him with extremely mild torture. Introducing the idea of a fake Izaya pushes us to a different assumption, which begins to seem even more likely when the associates of Amphisbaena and Heaven's Slave get a three-way phone call describing the facial features of their respective leaders. Ah, so the "Izaya" they kidnapped is their own leader! The panicked petty criminals both agree that's pretty screwed up, so they tear off the burlap sack and--!

Oh no, it is the real Izaya, and now that his crew is here, he's ready to kick some ass. The bad(der) guys are soundly defeated, and Izaya's knowledge of their leader's identity is left lingering in the air along with the identity of the fake Izaya. The easy assumption is that these persons are one and the same, which would imply that fake-Izaya is on friendly enough terms with real-Izaya that he would risk being taken out by the Awakusu to help him, but not friendly enough to get himself kidnapped by his own people. (And Izaya tells Shiki that fake-Izaya cut ties with Amphisbaena long ago anyway. I would say he's just covering for him, but Izaya's line about all lies being acceptable except for business lies leads me to believe he's telling the truth.)

I liked this episode, but I would have liked it a lot more if it had been given some space to breathe. I barely had time to put together who was really under the sack, why they were kidnapped, and all the mechanics of why this whole subplot mattered, before the episode wrapped up and slid right through to the credits. I liked Celty's clever little role in the episode, and I'm glad the show is using her character well again. I liked Izaya's line "I may lie to myself and others, but I never lie about business," because it sums up his complex character so well in such a tiny amount of words. I liked seeing Mikage just flat-wreck the Heaven's Slave goons, and I liked the markedly improved animation throughout all of it. (The quality has actually been pretty solid for several episodes straight now!) But by the end, this mostly felt like setup for a much larger scheme in the works. We'll just see what Izaya has planned for his new league of supervillains in the episodes to come.

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.