Engage Kiss – 09 – Demon’s Due

Yuugiri Akino’s AAA wins the auction by one dollar to take out the latest Demonically Possessed: Miles Morgan. Mikhail, it would seem, is trying to get rid of every trace of Asmodeus, including Akino and Shuu. We also get to see Mikami put the pieces together just before dying by Miles’ hand.

When Miles drives Shuu to the middle of a big park, he tells him Asmodeus is his benefactor whom he can never repay. Shuu wants him to apologize to everyone, including him but Miles has no regrets, and transforms into a Demon Hazard.

As a giant demonic monster, Miles proves too much for Ayano and her AAA troops, but luckily Shuu struck a deal for Sharon to lend a hand in taking down Miles in exchange for her freedom from police custody and for the memories of Asmodeus’ puppet, Miles.

In what is otherwise a very dry and dour episode, Sharon at least adds a bit of flair and ridiculousness by throwing a running motorcycle Miles’ way. Ayano repays Sharon saving her life by putting a gun to her head, but grudgingly accepts her help.

While Shuu and Kisara initially stand back and watch what happens, it soon becomes apparent Kisara needs to get involved, even if it ends up killing Shuu’s foster father. So Shuu tells Kisara what she needs to take from Miles and gets to smooching.

Hot Topic Kisara relieves Ayano and Sharon and has a proper rough-and-tumble brawl with Miles eventually piercing him from behind with her sword and putting him in a position to be shot by Shuu’s demon gun.

Shuu’s off-camera shot is followed by a rundown of the events that led to Miles breaking bad. It boils down to his daughter Melissa having a terminal illness and Asmodeus, who possessed the body of Shuu’s mother Sayuri (either always or at some point).

Miles did what Asmodeus told him, betraying Shuu’s family, while the mine explosion was caused by Shuu’s dad detonating a bomb. Miles’ daughter made a miraculous recovery, Miles took in Shuu as a mercy, and as he said, his debt to Asmodeus remains active and unending.

Kisara sucks up all of these memories swimming in what’s left of Miles’ human brain, either killing him or putting him at death’s door. Meanwhile, Kisara’s latest kiss has rendered Shuu so devoid of memories he had to refer to a note on his hand to recall that Miles killed Mikami.

Miles is defeated, but no one looks happy as the sun gets low over the scene, while Shuu looks distraught, but also quite lost. Sharon warned that at some point his contract with Kisara would render him unable to remember or even feel anything. We’ll see if Shuu can escape that cruel fate in the final four episodes of the series.

Engage Kiss – 08 – The [REDACTED] is Already Dead

Engage Kiss does not care one single whit about your tonal or genre whiplash. After last week’s poisonous members and tentacle mech suits, we get what amounts to a hard-boiled detective procedural, and the results are…mixed.

While I appreciated the episode’s dedication to showing its work, that work is rarely glamorous. The monotony of what amounts to scene after scene of exposition as Detective Mikami, Miles, and Shuu try to piece things together is at least punctuated by the usual Kisara-Ayano sniping.

Last week’s MVP Sharon is tied to a chair behind bars this week, unable to unleash her full horny/trashy/sacred/profane shtick, but still wields power as someone who remembers crucial information Shuu forgot thanks to Kisara.

It’s pretty significant that Shuu thought Kisara would let him keep certain important memories, but Sharon says that it doesn’t work that way and he’s actually lost a lot more than he knows, and she’s not lying just for spite. All she offers “for free” about the identity of the big bad is an arsonist analogy.

Before Shuu can interpret the scant info Sharon gave him, Mikami has a eureka moment that seems primed to blow this case wide open…just as the trench-coated “Informant X” who’s been feeding Shuu shows up.

Mikami leaves a voicemail for Shuu, and during the recording he is confronted by someone and a gunshot rings out. By the time Shuu and Kisara arrive in the station lot, Mikami is dead, and Informant X tries to slink away. Shuu and Kisara show what a good pair they make by cornering and unmasking the guy…who turns out to be Mikhail.

I gotta say, that’s a pretty cheeky revelation—to dangle this oji-san like high school character who feels like he’s from another anime as the delusional third child in the family pecking order, only to reveal that he’s the mysterious General Director of Bayron City Police, from whom everyone gets their orders.

With his cover blown, Mikhail takes Shuu and Kisara down to his secret surveillance information center deep under the city hall, where he has over three million cameras going 24/7/365, (even on his sisters while they shower and sleep, an observation Shuu is quick to make and condemn).

The other fake-out in play is that Mikhail didn’t murder Mikami, and the camera footage proves it. The person who did is the one for whom Mikhail is merely a puppet, the second human agent who is coordinating the creation and destruction of demonically possessed.

Mikhail’s sudden major player turn takes a backseat to the emotional fallout from Mikami’s sudden murder, and it’s a good reminder of how good the show can be at occasionally taking the goofy/horny elements down a notch and letting these people be humans.

This culminates in Mikami’s funeral, always a solemn affair, followed by Shuu being picked up by his foster father and old pal Miles, who can’t believe Mikami is gone. When Miles talks about Mikami as the rare natural police who was also softhearted and guillible, Shuu drops the hammer: he knows Miles murdered Mikami.

Sure enough, a tattoo on Miles’ arm glows. While I’m hardly enthused by the only brother in the cast being the big bad, his villainous turn isn’t altogether unearned. Like us, Shuu’s had a huge blind spot for the guy, in his case due to the events and conversations he’s forgotten because his contract with Kisara takes away much more than he thought.

Shuu’s been trying to piece together a mystery when his own memory has been crumbling behind him in real time. Now he’s lost a true ally in Mikami and another main ally has turned out to be false. It’s safe to say things are going to get worse before they get better for Shuu.