is plotting to do him harm.
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| Remnants of a happy childhood. Except that they're memories of a man well into old age. |
I would to comment on the baseball scene. Nothing out of the ordinary with it to those familiar with the series. Until the pitcher who threw the ball walks on-screen asking for the wayward ball. Although he's a child-sized figure, the shape of his head is wrong, as if he were some sort of wizened gnome in baseball player attire. It's so out of place with the rest of the purported context that it actually ends up robbing the scene of its expected attention. It inadvertently draws attention away from the startled chairman, which alone seems unlikely.
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| Little known fact: Billy the Kid wasn't murdered as history would have as believe |
Until you see the scene in all its unexpected glory. And that's where lies the charm of this series. The author - Nobuyiki Fukumotto - doesn't care about making women and children cute like the glut of animes that the average viewer is likely to have watched. He employs the same style for both men, girls and children. This style doesn't follow some boring NPC template either. The model for every character is the same: bold lines for the outline of the body, over simplistic hairstyles, outrageous nose shapes, unexpressive eyes, overly square mouths. This scene plays tribute to this constant trend, without failing to amuse like all the previous occurrences. The search for the chairman's body double proves difficult. One of the black suits blames it on the chairman's peculiar nose format. They're about to give up hope when they happened upon an eatery. This series likes to feature places designed for eating. So much so that the viewer almost feels tempted to watch this while in mid lunch. The mood is just too perfect.
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| Pick a card. Just make sure to pick the one I'm guessing you'll choose. |
Anyway, the waiter comes up to take their orders and it turns out that he's the one they'd been looking for all over. They decide to take him, claiming that he would be doing them a great favour. Their rare find is bewildered at first, but he's eventually convinced when he hears that he'll be fed and housedin exchange for his cooperation. He plays along, including the part where he has to go on a training course to become like the chairman in manners, in addition to looks. The training turns out to be a success, although he wouldn't quite act the same way as the real chairman. He might feign anger or displeasure at his subordinates, but he wouldn't ever take it to the next level. It doesn't feel natural like the real thing, but to Tonegawa, that's enough. He's ready to deliver the good news to his grumpy superior (the real one), one he's ct off mid-sentence and asked to pick a card. The gist of the game is that the chairman is supposed to guess which card he picked based on whatever is written in the book he was reading. He obviously guesses wrong, but this strange tirade is enough to reveal to our protagonist that the Chairman's flitting obsession with his body double is over. He mulls it over for a while, then decides to hand to Endo the task of getting rid of the fake chairman. Endo does it by driving him to an unfamiliar woods, giving him a steak on a plate on the ground along with a wad of cash, and drives away. The blacksuit responsible for taking the chairman lookalike under his wing is bereft of a true friend, and spends the remainder of the episode ina forlorn mood, with little hope of ever seeing him again. Until his wanted old partner makes his way back to the Teiai building all the way from that forest where he had been left stranded. Everyone seems relieved that no harm came to him and the prodigal son is even offered to be adopted by Teiai.
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| Dark power emanates from the chairman's pensive mood. |
