[Categories: Anime Reviews]
Darker than Black 4
Bloody hell, this show can be downright brutal when it feels the need to be! This episode delivers some pretty visceral scenes in which hapless police officers get scliced up and some innocent souls get burned alive; the perpetrator of the latter event did not even intend to do so. In a rare moment of levity, Kirihara tells a friend/associate about the nature of the Contractors; it’s not surprising that Mai turns out to be one such person. Kirihara and her fellow officers are not aware of the Contrator’s identity however, and what results is a succession of really nasty scenes in which Mai inadvertantly lets her powers loose to devastating effect.
The hunt is on for Mai with the police trying to identify the new Contractor and other Contractors trying to kidnap her; several nasty deaths later we end up with a tense hostage situation. While all this is great as a sci-fi/fantasy thriller, it’s even more interesting to see how Mai and her father fit into the bigger picture. It gets pretty dialogue-heavy at times but it also sounds like really important stuff in terms of the overall story.
While I feel an immense amount of pity for poor Mai (hopefully her new-found powers will make her stronger emotionally and allow her to drop the whiny little girl persona), her father is, in some ways, a victim too. Through a mixture of bad judgement and even worse luck, his investigations have brought suffering onto both he and his daughter. It makes you wonder what happened to Mai’s mother…
While many questions are answered many more of course are asked, not least those concerning what exactly lies at the Gate and what Mai’s father and his team were doing there. There’s a lot of tragedy in ths episode though, so I can only hope that things work out for Mai later on; by the looks of things ep #5 will be the beginning of a new arc so it might be a while before we see more of her. I’m also interested in hearing more from the old fortune teller who Kirihara sees at one point. It highlights how many separate groups there are, each with its own agenda.
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