Ah, here’s the fun road trip the pitch kind of promises. The episode is mostly concerned with getting Milo to bond with Akutagawa (the giant crab). The pacing is tuned down, which is a welcome breather even if we do get into some solid madness later.
The first bit involves the crab repeatedly throwing Milo off its back whenever he tries to ride it. This leads to a long day of crab training, which is at least a little funny and ultimately sees Milo do better than he thinks, with being impressing Bisco with his ability to talk to the crab (if not to ride it, which he remains bad at).
During this process, they end up meeting the pink-haired mercenary again. She’s on her own now and despite an attempted crabjacking seems more comical than anything else. She also ends up giving herself the nickname of Jellyfish (after her hair style) during this episode, so I’ll call her Jellyfish from here on.
Bisco and Milo eventually find their way to the temple previewed at the end of the last episode, where they find Jellyfish being choked to death from the inside by a parasitic worm used to keep slaves and prisoners from fleeing their masters. Milo saves her and after some humorous banter that also shows how warped the world is (she has trouble believing that they don’t intend to ravish her, since if they just let her die they could have taken her supplies for free) she sets up shop with her new traveling merchant routine and sells them some much-needed food. She ends up pitching some fuel since it’s not going to sell to somebody who rides a crab around, and the spilled material ends up being what wakes up the temple.
This is a problem, not just because the temple is a giant and now angry armed mollusk, but because its rampage could destroy the mine where Bisco planned to hop a train to their destination, costing precious time that Pawoo and especially Jabi might not have. Milo manages to ride Akutagawa properly and strike a critical blow that allows Bisco to finish the thing with his mushroom arrows. However, one last stray shot from the temple-thing blows up the mine anyway, meaning we’re picking another route for next time. In the morning, Jellyfish is gone (for now) along with a good amount of Milo and Bisco’s cash, but she left them a host of supplies for the ‘trade’ and a note offering that Milo can team up with her, so it’s not likely she’ll be doing much antagonizing next time.
At the end, we see our leads out on a salt flat, hungry. Bisco tries to grab a watermelon, and then chase down a kid who got to it first, but the local greeting seems to involve plenty of childish masked figures with guns, so that’s a hell of a place to leave off for next time, whether we jump back to “how we got here” (like this episode from the end of the last one) or not.
I think the biggest gain from this episode was miss Jellyfish. Sure, we see some more of the weird wonder of what’s beyond city walls, but it’s kind of in line with what we knew before, different only in that it’s a lot greener than the desert wasteland we saw. Jellyfish, however, has gone from a somewhat annoying if also somewhat funny antagonist to a fully humorous (if also messed up) side character. The main duo (plus crab) also work pretty well here. I like that Bisco isn’t just the wise outsider teacher, and is instead quite naive about some aspects of life (like cookies that share his name), and that Milo has his own clear skills and advantages rather than falling into the “trainee” role. So far, the show is looking up, though it will be interesting to see what they do with the journey arc compared to the short timers given for the people Milo and Bisco want to save.