Durarara!! - Episode 13

After a week-long break, Durarara!! returns to kick off the second half of the series, while also bouncing us forward six months from the events that ended the show's opening half. Of course, those six months means that everything within Ikebukuro and the world of its various characters has returned to normal.... Well, normal apart from all of the things that are clearly anything but.

For starters, ever since the now infamous Dollars meeting instigated by Mikado, someone nicknamed "The Slasher" has been going around randomly... well, slashing people. With a katana. Nobody knows who the perpetrator is, but of course Selty's public appearance and outburst at around the same time has attracted plenty of attention in her direction - Not least from the police, who have hired a new bad boy named Kuzuhara Kinnosuke, tasked specifically with taking Selty into custody. Surprisingly, Selty is terrified by these new police tactics, while we can also clearly see that she's grown closer still to Shinra over the intervening months.


Speaking of Shinra, his father also arrives on the scene this episode, while we also briefly catch up with the lives of a number of other characters. Narration duties however are handled by Anri, and it's through her eyes that we learn about her own feelings, confusion and naivety when it comes to dealing with Masaomi and Mikado (and Mika Harima for that matter), before she finds herself caught up in the city's big story... and it seems she isn't the only one to become involved in the Slasher case in some shape or form.

After having built up so nicely throughout its first half, it's almost a little tricky to adjust to what almost feels like a partial reset of Durarara!!'s world, but thankfully all of the wonderful and colourful characters are still there to bring life to this show, with a couple of new additions to boot. That aside, I think we're going to simply have to wait and see what the second half of the series has chosen to bring us, as it's too early to make any real comments about it either way. Still, this particular episode did a good a job as you could have hoped of getting things rolling, with some nice touches of humour and also of character development to give the feeling that time has moved on rather than stood still for the six months we've been away. I can only hope that we can once again scale the dizzy heights reached by the first half of the series.