It’s the beginning of the end and there seems to be quite the fight ahead.
As of this episode, Division 4 (aka main character squad, plus extras) is going in to take out the girl with the Snake Devil contract and the sword man. The two of them, meanwhile, have gathered all the thugs they can (as well as a horde of zombies left over from the Zombie Devil) and are hoping to wipe out the Devil Hunters and, particularly, kill Denji despite the massive threat Makima presents.
Speaking of Makima’s massive threat, she spends the episode asking the Yakuza for everything they know about the Gun Devil and the people who have made deals with it. She asks politely at first, but when the Yakuza get reticent presents a bag with the eyeballs of all their loved ones, showing just how much influence she has and, though she mentions calmly that she’ll have them restored if the mob cooperates. And when someone dares raise a hand to her, he bleeds from the nose and then drops dead. The yakuza boss talks about “necessary evil” but he’s clearly neither anywhere near as necessary as Makima sees herself, nor half as evil.
An aside, but I find Makima to be a quite interesting character. She has a very soft manner, and Denji is into her which I think the audience is supposed to support. But she’s so ruthless and manipulative, that it’s fairly well established both that there’s no level of “dark” she won’t sink to in order to achieve her goals, and that her goals are unknown and possibly sinister. She always has a good reply, but the most savvy characters doubt her as much as her enemies dread her. That might just be the vibe that Chainsaw Man is going for, where she represents the “necessary evil” that was briefly discussed this episode, but at the same time if she turns out to be a villain, I wouldn’t even be remotely surprised. Frankly, she’s scarier than the Gun Devil right now, since the Gun Devil is unseen, making deals for cash, and was pretty much just a natural disaster in the backstory, while Makima is both terribly human and terribly inscrutable.
Clearly, she gets her names, as enemies start dropping dead from Makima’s powers. It’s not quite as spectacular as the squashing she did before, but it also doesn’t seem to need her to be in a special location or to provide human sacrifices.
In the assault, we meet a number of the other Division 4 weirdos — including the Shark Fiend, Violence Fiend, and Spider Devil — who are technically set up to be Denji and company’s new coworkers. But what of Aki? Well, the episode actually starts with Aki’s negotiation with the Future Devil, which offers a very cheap contract — all it wants is to live inside his eye, since it’s seen his future and he apparently has the most awesome of deaths awaiting him. This has granted him some combat prescience, which he uses to good effect as he takes on the Snake Devil’s contractor. However, she has Snake regurgitate the Ghost Devil, now under her command. Aki does a good job fighting it, but its power is somewhat overwhelming and it ultimately grabs him and begins to choke the life out of him. Which is when the girl gets a nosebleed. We don’t see that Makima has taken her out and it would kind of be a little annoying for her to die without an explanation or really a chance in hell of fighting back, but I doubt “choked by the ghost devil” is a cool enough exit to interest the Future Devil, so dollars to donuts Aki’s pulling out of this one.
Unless I miss my mark, we have one more episode. I think with one episode, we can hit our quota of awesome gory action and deal with Snake and Sword as our “final bosses” of the season — the Gun Devil still in play and thus the main story flagrantly not over, but the present arc resolved and the new Division 4 properly minted for future badass behavior. We’ll see more when we get there.