Durarara!!×2

Episode 3

Well, that was fast! It seems like we only just learned about the existence of the Hollywood murders, but the serial killer's identity and even motivations have been revealed in one fell swoop. (I guess this arc will be about something much larger than the who and why behind stray slashings, unlike the Saika case that Shinra's father was eager to draw comparisons toward.) To the show's credit, Hollywood's identity is not anything so simple and cliché as "Aoba all along" or "the Orihara twins all along." Of course, this is Durarara!!, so it's not an entirely new face either. Let's just say Hollywood's true self is bound to make one idol-loving, reckless-driving member of The Dollars very sad. This episode is all about the towering, monstrous Hollywood and her (?!) reasons for killing strangers under the masks of famous horror movie villains.

At the same time, this episode is about Kasuka, whose connection to the Hollywood killings is both created and justified in this episode. After his brother Shizuo takes out his violent frustrations with masked criminals on Hollywood when he suspects her of robbery, Kasuka knows just the doctor to patch her back up again. Both Shinra and Celty suspect there's something supernatural at play in the idol-turned-killer's body, but she and her "normal human" rescuer have something in common: an unknown hole in their souls. Kasuka explains to Hollywood, (I guess we can call her Ruri now,) that he only rescued her because it's something one of the hero roles in his movies would have done. There's something broken in Kasuka that he doesn't understand, some part of his brain that's meant to react and develop and forge connections with the world like a normal human's that just doesn't work, so he "hides" it by acting. He becomes a blank vessel for his roles to fill, and once the job is over, he lets the roles remain inside him, hoping that if enough of them pile up and combine into a new character, he'll become that role, and no one will ever know that he was born "abnormal." It's funny because we know his brother Shizuo much better than him, and he has the opposite problem: he's unable to control his emotions or restrain his id and has no choice but to let it spill out violently whenever something trips his system. (Maybe he was born with all of his younger brother's emotions and personality ahead of time? In the world of Durarara!!, it's certainly possible!)

We don't know enough about Ruri's past to understand why she feels such a strong connection to Kasuka's story, lamenting to herself that "he's more human than I am!" All we know is that Ruri seems to have a bizarre combination of Shizuo and Kasuka's traits. Her serial killings are entirely unvoluntary, rooted in a childhood admiration of movie monsters but divorced from a desire to actually commit the killings, to the extent that her body moves on its own and is probably possessed by some supernatural power, according to Celty. At the same time, she recognizes the emptiness that Kasuka fights against inside her own heart, having lost her family at a young age but finding herself unable to grieve them, because she was raised in an austere, aristocratic home strangely devoid of love. (Perhaps a cult? The plot thickens.)

Through Kasuka's involvement with Ruri, now made public through the tabloids as a consequence of sneaking her out of his apartment, the Orihara twins are already being reeled into the tangled web as well. After all, they can't let some other woman take their dream guy's perfect lips away from them...even though there is no romance between the famous actor and the famous idol, and both of them are relying on their masks of fame to hide the "monsters" they believe themselves to be. I have the sneaking suspicion that unlike Hollywood, Izaya's sisters would have no qualms over killing innocent people to get what they want. Aoba's still a giant question mark as well, but if anything has become clearer about Masaomi's replacement, it's that he's more interested in Anri than Mikado. Could he be holding Mikado's true identity as collateral to acquire the power of Saika? Who is this little douchebag?

What I'm saying is a lot of things happen in this episode, as if to make up for all the hint-laying and meandering of the first two episodes, but unfortunately, that doesn't make it an exciting experience. Most of this information, fascinating though it may be, is conveyed through narration, monologue, and scenes of talking heads. There's still a lot of magic and menace in this source material, but the animated series itself seems to be running on autopilot in a way that the first season never did. At least the writing of Arc 4 is a huge step up from the writing of Arc 3, and I'm looking forward to seeing how all the madness and intrigue plays out. I just wish the direction was a little more inspired. Someone needs to shake Studio Shuka around a little and wake them up.

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.