With the pace this show is taking, I might stick to reporting in every other week. It’s a great ride, but it takes its sweet time to get its plot out.
This pair of episodes covers the actual try-outs for the Defense Force. We start off by getting to know Kikoru a little better, as she competes with Kafka on the various tests thanks to his bravado in the parking lot. This amounts to rubbing his face in the fact that he’s just about the least qualified man on the planet for the job, up to and including being the only time the examiner has seen someone with a literal 0% affinity for the super-suits made for the defense force. That may be due to Kafka’s kaiju nature, but we’ll leave speculation aside for now.
Phase 2, after basic physical testing and the suit adjustment, is a practical segment. The intel was that for the last two years, this had been clean-up of Kaiju corpses… but no such luck for Kafka as this time it’s more of a live-fire exam with come captured minor Kaiju as targets for the team. Kafka does realize that it’s not purely combat aptitude the examiners are testing for, and with Ichikawa shows his stuff as a supporter, letting everyone know how to exploit the weaknesses of the monsters they’re facing thanks to his great knowledge of the foes. Kikoru, of course, is more determined to win through the “one-woman army” method. This even leads her to go up against the higher-class big enemy alone, just to prove how much better she is. Along the way, Kafka gets a bit of a broken leg, but he toughs it out in a way that impresses the examiner (and possibly Mina, who is there) enough to not have him flagged for extraction and failure.
This ends up being rather important when a humanoid kaiju shows up. It resurrects the dead enemies, and pretty much incapacitates Kikoru before buggering off. Just as all hope seems to be lost for the ace, Kafka shows in Kaiju form and takes out the reanimated baddie, saving her life but also revealing his secret to her. Luckily, she seems inclined to keep everything to herself when questioned in recovery, and officially Kafka and Ichikawa are credited with extracting the badly wounded Kikoru.
As for that humanoid Kaiju? It looks like it’s lurking incognito among Kafka’s disposal team friends, plotting its next move. Surely this isn’t a setup for our main baddie, an intelligent humanoid Kaiju fully aligned against humanity
That was sarcasm. That’s exactly what that is. And we’ll see how it unfolds going forward.
One note I want to make as an anime viewer is that while most of the focus in terms of introducing new characters is on Kikoru (she even gets a fairly meaty flashback as she seems about to die), the Examiner – Vice-Captain Soushirou Hoshina – also gets some good play. He’s shown to have quite the sense of humor, but perhaps with a scary side to him. The latter came on heavier to my recollection in the manga, while the former has thusfar been more evident in the anime, perhaps because the animated medium where you have things like motion and tone of voice can give him bigger reactions. It’s a nice start on his character, and the humor side is a good touch. Again, Kaiju No. 8 is kind of a show for folks who may have enjoyed Dorohedoro and Chainsaw Man, with a similar mix of goofball humor, deadpan humor, violence, and gore. The first of those is still and important part of the creative DNA.