Naturally, the continuation of this ever more horrifying trend of deaths is getting to local doctor Ozaki - A little too much you could argue, as he snaps first at a patient and then at Muroi despite the latter trying to help by mentioning the odd connections between these deaths and the number of people who have quit their jobs while others have skipped town entirely. The only ray of hope from Ozaki's point of view is one patient who seems to recover slightly after being given a blood transfusion, but even this improvement doesn't last for long before the same old symptoms and problems set in once again.
However, that isn't the only piece of progress made against this "epidemic" by any means. For starters, the end of summer postcard from Megumi discarded outside of his window by Natsuno has some pieces missing by the next morning, confirming in his mind (and indeed to our own eyes) that Megumi is still wandering around on the loose somewhere, somehow. On a whim after seeing this, he starts looking into vampires and the like, renting a bunch of horror movies before finding that, intriguingly, Muroi has already emptied the library's stock of vampire books. Come the end of the episode, Natsuno isn't the only one whose thoughts are traversing this path, as a throwaway comment to Natsuno by Ozaki suddenly clicks a number of pieces of the puzzle into place. Add in a couple of other characters seeing a supposedly dead man walking into that fancy house on the hill, and it appears that the tide of whatever is going on might well be turning at last...
Certainly, as these thoughts, theories and revelations begin to roll into place, so Shiki is starting to become just that bit more compelling - although it struggles under the weight of its sheer number of characters at times (no matter how many of them have died), it finally feels like a show that is beginning to rise above its slow start to piece together something genuinely worth watching with plenty of intrigue to back it up. It's taken six episodes to get here, but I now feel like I can officially say that Shiki is starting to warm up nicely for me - long may it continue.
I personally enjoyed Shiki for its slow-pacedness; it doesn't introduce the main plot late (rather, at the very beginning), it doesn't have useless filler episodes, it doesn't end the "main" plot and then suddenly introduce a new one (or so I hope) - it just has one plot with every episode having some importance in it.
ReplyDeleteShiki is arguably the best show of the season, IMO, and that'll doubly prove true once the latter episodes roll in.
It is amazing how many characters we have been introduced to. Some of whom barely have had any screentime -- some because they died so quickly after being introduced.
ReplyDeleteBut things really do seem to have picked up lately, so I think the building up has been worth it.