Recap: King Torture calls for a showdown, and Samurai Flamenco is eager to oblige. This sounds, but enclosed are Watchmen spoilers, so read at your own risk.

Things keep getting darker and darker as we go farther into the story. I thought it was bad enough when they were showing the after effects of torture, but actually showing Moe’s finger get deformed as it is crushed by those pliers is about as visceral you can get without going into straight gore. The buzzsaw scene that lead into King Torture’s transformation into Ash Williams was also really impressive for how grotesque it could make it look while still showing as little as possible. Samurai Flamenco has proven it’s not going to shy away from what it means to be criminally insane.

There’s actually small but scary amount of sense to King Torture’s philosophy. Human history has proven that, given the choice, most people will choose to do the wrong thing. Good takes a long time for its fruits to actually become visible. Evil has an easier job, it only needs to appeal to one’s spirit of corruption, a form of catharsis. Good normally requires sacrifice. We see that with Mari and Moe, where Moe’s genuine(if a little creepy) care for Mari overcomes her fear, whereas Mari’s selfish thrillseeking is easily exposed for what it really is. More often than not, doing the right thing is tough. Limited by the very ideals it wishes to uphold,  it is difficult for good to truly change anything.

His plan is straight out of any villain’s handbook. Have a plan to take over the world? Make sure you start it after you’ve already told the hero what it’s going to do. I’ve always had so much respect for the story of Watchmen that it had the villain balk at the idea of being so cliche. I don’t quite get why he built the giant rocket when it seemed like the monsters were already freaking people the fuck out on their own. Since this is Toku, I guess we needed something to blow up, but it just seemed a little obvious. I also don’t get how Goto got out of that alive. Didn’t he fall into the silo when trying to ram the rocket? Even if he didn’t, how did he run far enough away from it that he was able to meet up with Samurai Flamenco and not get caught up in the blast?

With all this talk of cyborg cells and the lack of a body, I’m not buying for a second that this is the end of King Torture. It will be interesting to see where the series goes in his immediate absence, though. Mari is nigh catatonic after her incident, and it looks like her days as Flamenco Girl are done. Will the story go into how she lives with herself after the trauma she went through in King Torture’s hands? Samurai Flamenco now has no villain to fight, and yet Hazama revealed himself as Samurai Flamenco. How is he going to be able to maintain a normal life, now that crime fighting will go back to its more pedestrian roots? This series has been pretty smart about that kind of thing so far, so I’m hoping to see these questions answered soon.