Tiger & Bunny - Episode 18

Although making the decision to quit as a hero before his powers dwindle and diminish entirely might have been simple enough for Kotetsu, I think we all knew that actually telling his felling heroes of his plans would be another matter altogether.

So it goes that Wild Tiger's problems are soon pushed into the shade by Barnaby's needs, as Kotetsu's return happens to coincide with Krieme coming out of the coma she had been in ever since the climax of the incident with Jake.  Needless to say, Barnaby is keen to find out more about the death of his parents, but as Krieme relates her tale of Stockholm Syndrome taken to an extreme with regards to her relationship with Jake a shocking revelation closes the conversation permanently - Jake wasn't the killer of Barnaby's parents after all.

While Barnaby refuses to believe this at first, as the evidence mounts that this is indeed the case (and you'd have thought he would have noticed this stuff sooner given all the investigating he'd been doing) so one of our pair of titular heroes is thrown into turmoil as his memories choose to have betrayed him.  So who did kill Barnaby's parents?  Once more than question looms large over the series, elbowing Kotetsu's needs out of the way in the process as his partner looks set to be overwhelmed by the same emotions that caused him so many problems in the first half of the series and then some.

While it was obvious that something was all set to overtake Barnaby's decision to quit, part of me wishes that it wasn't a return to the whole "who killed Barnaby's parents" argument - I was fully expecting something new to come to the fore, so the prospect of more "Bunny angst" doesn't particularly excite me, especially given his irrationality when it comes to both convincing himself that Jake was responsible for his parents death and his sudden descent into madness just because those memories are playing tricks on him.  It all feels a little forced to me at this point in the series, but hopefully Tiger & Bunny will prove me wrong and pull something decent out of things as they stand.  Goodness knows this show has proven me wrong enough times before...