Love of Kill

Episode 5

After last week's episode, I was genuinely hoping that there would be more to the relationship between Ryang-ha and his former coworker. After all, the show spent so many episodes building this guy up, and he went through the trouble of kidnapping Château just to draw out Ryang-ha. But at the end of the day, this confrontation went out not with a bang, but with a whimper. It was a little too short for its own good, but that's not all; even the confrontation between this drugged-up assassin and Château from the previous episode (which lasted less than a minute) felt like it had more weight and intrigue to it than whatever we saw here. It also doesn't help that the flashback we get into this assailant's relationship with the previous boss Ryang-ha supposedly killed feels like more of a justification for why he's so hyped up on drugs right now than it is an attempt to invoke any kind of emotion or sympathy for this guy.

The only thing it really amounts to is catching Ryang-ha off guard so that he receives a potentially fatal wound, which is admittedly my favorite part of the episode because it does put him in a vulnerable spot. It's nice that he needed to rely on Château to survive for the first time, even if he didn't realize it at the moment, and Château could've easily just killed him or left him to die considering that this guy continues to not be 100% straight with her. But of course she saves him after noticing how far he was willing to go to save her from a perilous situation...a situation that he is indirectly responsible for putting her in the first place. It's not exactly out of character, but the attempts at deepening the relationship between these two do feel somewhat contrived. If the show is subtly angling for a romance between these two then I don't feel it. If anything, that whole scene where he's saying that the two of them should run away together feels more like he's trying to get her away from something than anything romantic. I'm kind of just waiting for the penny to drop at this point, and I am more interested in having that mystery unraveled than stacking on more assassination attempts. However, I also think there is a more organic way to link those two things together. Next week seems to introduce another threat to our protagonists' lives, so maybe there will be more going on with that character than there was with this failed assassination attempt.

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Love of Kill is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.