The Blood-Soaked Bitter Melon

Key Events

Koneko announces that Hamatora will go on a business trip to Okinawa for a new job. Nice enrolls  back at the school with Theo and Rei whilst Murasaki is back as a teacher again, they both join them on their school trip to Okinawa. This way it’s cheaper to fly there and they can pocket the difference between a normal flight that the client’s paid for and the school trip’s flight price.

The job relates to a drink called Ideal. It causes the drinker to fall asleep and never wake up again. But they’re not dead, just sleeping happily dreaming away. Though according to doctors, there’s nothing in the drink that would do that. The client is someone from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and he knows that there’s probably another power at work. So he wants Hamatora to go to Okinawa and detain the person manufacturing the drinks. The culprit’s name is Hiiragi Shuuichi, the brother of the client, hence why he wants them to bring him to him and not the police.

At the beach in Okinawa, Theo runs into a gang who, long story short, challenges them to a battle that decides who can go on the beach. The battle is a triathlon happening the next day and the school will send a representative.

Elsewhere continuing with work, Nice’s clever thinking gets them to the culprit pretty quickly. But Hiiragi’s already used Ideal on himself. Seems he wanted to escape his harsh reality into something more dreamlike. After checking his computer, Nice realises he’s another victim of Moral’s minimum implantation.

Theo convinces Nice to enter the triathlon to compete against the gang because the top prize is a year supply of bitter melon hamburger patties, which is what Hajime wanted as a souvenir. However he has to face Ratio and Birthday and Three and Honey who took on work to win the triathlon for the gang.

The triathlon is swimming, cycling, then a ‘battle royale’ with bitter melons. Honey takes the lead with some sly trickery whilst Three and Birthday are disqualified for a very strange reason. Ratio withdraws tending to people with injuries. At the last event, Nice finishes off Honey. The finale approaches quickly as Murasaki appears out of nowhere taking out everyone else leaving just those two.

Murasaki knows he can’t win but still fights valiantly. With Hiiragi watching the display, he feels Murasaki’s determination and wakes up from his dream with renewed resolve to live on his life.

We end the episode with an unnerving scene of Moral being surrounded by several people with their heads open.

Thoughts

Well, Moral’s ability does seem like what I believe it to be. Now that he has ‘access’ to Art he can transform into him too. And yes I purposely didn’t include the being dead part here as Gasquet showed himself at the end. So now I’m modifying my prediction slightly into that just ‘access’ is needed, and I’ll go further and say that the ‘access’ that’s needed may be their DNA or something similar, so that would be enough for the person not to be dead for Moral to copy. Which would then imply that Gasquet was definitely in on it from the beginning and he’s actually not dead. Unless he is dead and Moral’s found a way to clone himself…

With a showing of Koneko’s money saving abilities I’m liking her a lot more. I think she has the makings of an accountant, she at least knows how to get money to go an extra mile. I can’t remember if it’s already mentioned, but I’m assuming she’s the treasurer of Hamatora, so in a way she’s the accountant there.

Another light hearted fun jokey type episode, perhaps needed to ‘recover’, so to speak, from last episode’s tragedy. Not quite a beach episode but probably the closest this anime will get to one and I still enjoyed it. Showed off more personality for everyone, and also showed that Nice isn’t just about his Minimum, his physical abilities are pretty good too, and of course he is also quite intelligent.

Another episode with a less ‘involved’ case. It didn’t take much to solve it and it didn’t relate to anything else either. I felt it was more of a catalyst for Murasaki’s character development than anything else. Not really much mystery to it either. Yes he was another one of moral’s victims, but that was all that related to something else. It didn’t take long to find him, they knew his name and they knew what he did, nothing really that constitutes to mystery, but I’m fine with that as the episode overall was fun.

Moral’s slowed down a bit, I thought he’d rush into his next move, but I guess he’s got a lot to prepare for his master plan, whatever it is. That is the question though, what is he doing? Surrounded by opened heads, is he giving them minimums? Or is he extracting their minimums for himself? That said, I actually don’t remember if anything was said about how Moral ‘gives’ minimums to people. I know it’s about that website then following his instructions and then the guy will be knocked out somewhere meaning that we don’t actually know what happens. This operation that he’s in the middle of could be it, placing a certain part of the brain that governs the minimum into a non-minimum person. Could be as simple as that, though if that’s the case how does he intend to get a minimum into himself? He’ll have to operate on himself, or I suppose get someone else to do it for him, a lot of trust there. Unless the operation is not the way, and he’s just harvesting more minimums now that he has Art’s access to everything, namely, I’m thinking of, the morgue. Much easier to take bodies from there if you can change into one of the top officials in the police department. Well, I think it’s obvious we won’t see a continuation until his preparations are complete, I doubt Hamatora can make any move on their own without any knowledge of what’s going on, so we’re just waiting on Moral.