Samurai Flamenco - Episode 2

Humble though his beginnings might be, but Samurai Flamenco is continuing to fight against evil as best he knows how... even if this knowledge is limiting him to telling people not to put out their rubbish at the wrong time amongst other things.

No matter how pure his motivations, it seems as if a lot of people are getting the wrong idea about what Samurai Flamenco is up to in some shape or form, causing police complaints to pile up, in turn giving Goto something of a headache as he ponders what to do about the situation.  In the meantime, we're introduced to Hazama's rather fierce manager Ishihara, and also get to see Hazama taking on a job outside of his normal modelling comfort zone - a job that sees him grab the interest of an upcoming idol when she catches him quietly singing the theme tune to one of his favourite superhero shows.

As the complaints against "that weird guy with the tights" continue to build, Goto has no choice but to pull his new-found friend to one side and ask him to cool his "performances" as Samurai Flamenco for a while - a request that falls on deaf ears, of course.  While Goto again suggests that fighting against such tiny "crimes" is pointless, Hazama recounts the story of the time as a child when he took a classmates umbrella and the consequences of that act as a formative moment in his life - and whaddya know, it seems that someone has pinched Goto's umbrella as he goes to leave the restaurant with Hazama.  The result is another moment in the limelight for Samurai Flamenco as the video of him retrieving the umbrella goes viral online.

Let's get the big negative about this week's Samurai Flamenco out of the way first - the whole umbrella thing was a pretty daft and tortured way of moving the episode and this series forward in the way that it wanted to progress, and even considering the show's premise it felt incredibly cheesy.  Luckily, this arguably lazy decision didn't impact too heavily on what was otherwise a hugely entertaining episode - clearly this show needs to head in some different directions before its current ideas become stale, but there was a lot of fun to be had watching Hazama flapping around in and out of costume, while his interactions with Goto work better than they probably should.  I'm a bit worried that the series will end up becoming predictable, but at the moment I'm still very much enjoying it.