Kencho manages to track down Anju, thank goodness, who went after her dog, the only family she has left, but the older baddie ends up cornering them atop the roof of a barn, and intends to push them off....
Kencho manages to track down Anju, thank goodness, who went after her dog, the only family she has left, but the older baddie ends up cornering them atop the roof of a barn, and intends to push them off. Bea is headed to the water wheel but is knocked off her horse by the female baddie, who engages her in a hedge-trimmer/katana duel.
When the old folks tell Shizuka they can’t run, she throws risk analysis out the window and heroically lures the zombies away. Akira uses a farmer’s hoe to cut back the zombies descending on his parents and the three city survivors he befriended. Our group may be completely split up, like the bad guys, but they’re not really alone.
Akira’s dad is clearly keeping some kind of terminal illness a secret from his son, but even if he wasn’t about to keel over from that, he’d probably still tell his son to stay inside and let him handle the zombies. He may never be an astronaut, but he still has a son with dreams he isn’t interested in outliving.
We get the sob stories of the old baddie, the fat baddie, and the female baddie, and honestly I didn’t even have the energy to break out the world’s tiniest air violin. These three suck. In contrast to our four heroes, they’ve only ever cared about themselves. They have no one to blame for their miserable lives than themselves.
Our heroes don’t usually have to try to reason with their adversaries (because they’re typically mindless zombies), but I like how they try here, starting with Kencho perfectly outlining all of the little ways the old bad guy messed up with his relationship with his wife.
When that doesn’t work Kencho goes Full Kencho (i.e. nude) and dives head-first into the cesspit. The zombies lose his scent and surround the old bad guy, who runs into the over-electrified fencde. When Kencho emerges he is now entirely pixelated (thank goodness) and Anju warns him in no uncertain terms he’s not to come near her until he’s bathed thoroughly.
With the girl and her dog safe, we head back to the house where all the elderly villagers are holed up. Old Man Hiko, typically bedridden, asks where his late wife Akemi is. When they tell him Shizuka is using herself as bait, he asks them what they’re still doing there.
The fat bad guy is armed with a pistol and chasing Shizuka to French kiss her, but Hiko, a sharpshooter, manages to intervene, and mustered the other older villagers to protect Shizuka and beat the crap out of the bad guy. Shizuka, shedding tears of relief and joy, thanks them from the bottom of her heart, but she earned their help by being so kind to them; by becoming a part of the community.
The female bad guy’s axe to grind is that people resented, hated, and mocked her for her unbending, my-way-or-the-high-way attitude towards everyone. Beatrix lists all the ways Germans do things that differ and may even seem ridiculous to the Japanese, but insists there is no perfectly right way to do things.
Beatrix then demonstrates that there’s more than one way to deactivate the water wheel, by leaping onto it and using the weight of the zombies attack to wrench it free. She then balances herself on the wheel and crushes the zombies one by one … but doesn’t crush the woman. Instead, the woman is surrounded by zombies an meets certain doom.
Finally, there’s Higurashi, the ringleader. His three comrades may be defeated, but he proves he’s real boss asshole material by plucking up Akira’s dad, who is on his last legs, and threatening to toss him to the zombies unless Akira lets himself get zombified.
I’m gonna go not very far out on a limb and predict that the MC of this show is not going to kick the bucket in episode 12. Between zombies and his health condition his dad seems like a more likely victim. Maybe our now-dreadlocked recovered salaryman will find some way to talk down or outfox Higurashi. Or maybe he’ll get some last-minute help from his friends, who are now free to help him.
