In which we hit the obligatory low point turning point.
In this episode, Ichibanboshi goes out drinking to drown his sorrows regarding his brother. He runs into a guy who has strong words about family, caring deeply about his own sister, and the two of them drink through the night chatting about sibling problems.
Unfortunately, it seems like the nice guy who cares about his sister is a conspirator who wants out of the conspiracy. The Masked Demons claim that they’ll let him go, but of course we know that’s not going to work out.
The Shinsengumi make their raid, leaving Ichibanboshi behind to stew, and find an underground lair of the Masked Demons with lots of Kerosene jars strewn around. There, they spar with Rashomaru over the weird soul reactor thingy until he ignites the jars. Rashomaru beats the team to the exit and locks them in the basement that’s on fire.
Ichibanboshi decides to go to the place anyway, and arrives to find his brother standing on the basement door, taunting him about his friends liable to burn to death below. When unable to convince Ichibanboshi to kill him, he instead summons the guy from earlier (who the Shinsengumi also wants to capture alive) and insists they fight to the death, the guy because otherwise the demons will kill his sister and Ichibanboshi because he has the key to the basement door.
Meanwhile, Sogen rigs up a bomb trick that should allow them to escape the basement, They do, running through a fireball explosion for that purpose, and emerge to find Ichibanboshi, despite being horribly broken up about it, having just run through his opponent and temporary friend.
The episode, thus, ends with a relatively complete-seeming villain win: The target location is burned down, destroying all evidence. The one person who needed to be captured alive in order to extract a confession is dead. Ichibanboshi has had to actually end a life, killing someone he at least considered a friend, and because of this all it’s looking likely that the Shinsengumi will be disbanded. This is about what you expect for the middle of the story, where we have enough time to have everyone rally and recover from the setback.
At this juncture, let’s talk about what the show needs going forward. Most critically, Ichibanboshi needs to grow. He’s just been confronted with a sadistic choice, being responsible for death, and in a sense causing the defeat to be as total as it was because he disregarded orders to stay home. What we haven’t seen is how he takes that and how it changes him into the character that is, presumably, ultimately going to be able to win the day when we get to the final episode or episodes.
Because right now, Ichibanboshi has been the picture of the main character who fails all the time because he needs to better himself and grow into the hero role. In fact, for him it’s arguably much more literal than usual because he needs to grow into the role of Kondo Isami, not just the abstract hero role of the show. If he stays relatively static after what should have been this huge confrontation, it’s going to drag the show down in a big way.