Tsuritama - 6

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So the story development begins!

After 5 weeks of fantastic character development and feel good vibes, Tsuritama has now embarked on developing the story to match the sheer brilliance of it's characters. One thing I will say about this episode is that, while it started off as feel good as the rest, towards the end it gave off a different feeling about it and as such made Tsuritama a more delicious and made it into a contender for one of my favourite slice-of-lifes ever and possibly my favourite series of the spring season.

Looking at how the plot has progressed, there was a lot introduced and left to be resolved in the 5 remaining episodes and what better way of introducing a mountain of plot developments than through a character who we still don't know much about: Akira.

Besides the beginning where it's revealed that Keito will be released from the hospital and the boys are planning to surprise her with a tuna that Yuki has caught, the "true" plot of the episodes starts again with Akira and his fellow Indian spies (who are always eating curry whenever they are shown to be in the back of his truck) getting in contact with their flamboyant and even more mysterious boss. The conversation left me wondering whether Akira's boss is hiding something, purposefully telling Akira not to investigate the "Bermuda Syndrome" which he began uncovering last episode but unfortunately their interaction was too short to draw anything from it and remained funny as usual.

Afterwards Akira ends up going to the temple where he meets Eriko, who as you know I think will play an important role at one point or I like to think so considering that her appearances are always short but border on the suspicious/suggestive. Erika gets linked into the plot via the introduction of her grandfather, the Temple Head/Mayor/Modern Dance Guru and he reveals a little bit of mythology - if you remember the first episode started with something along the same lines and hasn't been revisited, so I was glad that it has now been cleared up that the beginning of the first episode wasn't just random - and ends up cracking wise that ends up unsettling Akira. During this scene I found Coco's appearance a little too random but considering that so far Akira hasn't been a friend of the aliens, her appearance could be of importance in the future; that or the fact that she's Haru's sister and as such has developed dancing habits like him.

The rest of the episode brings the focus back on fishing, all the while introducing a few more (fantasy) mystery elements to the plot, the biggest one being Akemi. So Akemi is what you could consider the mermaid song of fishing - you get attracted to it but then you might end up crashing your boat - and it not only started the chain of mystery in this series but it also gave the opportunity for Akira to become friends with the trio. It certainly does look like Akemi will be revisited in the future episodes but what was probably the most eye-catching in this episode was the scene where Haru loses control, and I say "loses control" because he resorts to using the water pistol he promised Yuki he would never use, ordered the "humans to fish" and even hesitated at one point when he could have sprayed Akira. The scene itself also added a pinch of seriousness that the series is void of, particularly with Akira pulling out a gun and knife, which then also developed into a possible (though unlikely) possible death situation for the boys; the Bermuda Triangle plot point was brought up her with literal triangles floating around.

The episodes end goes back to the feel good vibes one usually gets from watching Tsuritama, however this time we're left wondering what Haru's worried about and why there were fisherman doing the Enoshima dance.

I can safely conclude that this was my favourite episode 6 of the season, I'm really impressed that Akira was used as the main driver for the this episode since it not only gave the viewers an opportunity to be properly introduced to this rather elusive character but also because his elusiveness fit very well with parts of the episode where the tone was more mystery/drama instead of pure comedy. I also liked how Yuki's "cinema reel dreams" didn't appear in this episode, which may or may not hint the end of his major development.

I can't wait until the next episode!