Through a revisit to the kidnapping incident from episode 1, ep2 focuses on introducing Celty and Izaya more indepthly with the perspective of Kamichika Rio, the girl who was kidnapped.
The first day of high school places Mikado (along with the glasses girl named Sonohara Anri) in 1-A, and Kida in 1-B. During self-introduction, a student named Seiji Yagiri comes in to Mikado’s room late for class, but after announcing that he won’t be returning to school anymore and totally screwing the homeroom teacher over, he leaves once again.
Kamichika Rio herself is in Kida’s class, though the fact is she’d almost died two days ago. Rio had been living a fairly ordinary life with loving parents until one day, she found a letter filled with pictures of her father going out with another woman. Finding this hard to cope with, she secretly passes this letter onto her mother, but to her surprise nothing changes. Dismayed, Rio confides in an online buddy called Nakura.
Depressed that his father had hooked up with his girlfriend and that even his mother didn’t care, Nakura invites Rio to “disappear” with him as a message to their parents. Interest piqued, Rio falls headfirst into the oldest online kidnapper trick in the book to meet up with a man claiming to be Nakura, who, well, kidnaps her. Rio is content however to disappear from society, and accepts this as her destiny.
But even so, many things continue to stir in the background. At the request of an individual named Orihara Izaya, Celty had just departed and is speeding to Rio’s location (and just in time to gesture a shake of disapproval at a certain airborne vending machine).
After dispatching the kidnappers, Celty rides the now conscious Rio to a building, and instructs her to see the person on the roof. There, a man appears and reveals himself as the real Nakura, and admits that he was the one who arranged for both the kidnap and the rescue.
He proceeds to correctly pin down all of Rio’s emotions during the incident, and acknowledges a fondness for humans that’d driven him to experiment how Rio would react to all of this. Nakura takes her to the edge of the roof, where he hangs Rio by the corner and forces her to look at a bloodstain on the bottom that previous suiciders had left behind. After pulling her back, Nakura thanks Rio for entertaining him, and exits the roof.
Feeling manipulated and dejected, Rio jumps off. Before she lands however, she is saved by Celty’s shadows. With a simple message of “Because the world isn’t as cruel as you take it to be”, Celty leaves behind an enlightened Rio, who decides to forgive her parents. From then on, Rio can recognize the fact that everyone has dreams and secrets of their own, even those two doofuses watching a glasses girl chase after a student who’d skipped the first day of school.
In the night street, Celty encounters Orihara Izaya, alias Nakura, remarking on her interference. Celty questions him whether he’s responsible for the previous suicides, to which Izaya denies that he is bad enough to provoke it, but nor is he kind enough to stop it. At that, Celty rides off into the night, and Izaya thanks her for the fun.
So it looks like Rio is more or less a throwaway character used for the express purpose of fleshing out Izaya and Celty, and at that she did a pretty good job (Haruka Tomatsu was totally a bonus \o/). I know I’ve said this before, but damn is Izaya a magnificent bastard; I’m starting to see the reason why people are fangirling him left and right. He is still shrouded pretty much in mystery of course, but his manipulative and likely sadistic nature will no doubt make for a pretty awesome collision with the other characters of the cast. This episode also showed a surprising side to Celty, namely her compassion towards Rio along with her questioning of Izaya’s personality. In fact, she reminds me a bit of Chane from Baccano!, with a silent yet deadly kind of vibe.
And speaking of Baccano!, I love how Durarara!! adopted its predecessor’s quirk of showing a same time frame through the eyes of different groups, emphasizing how each intertwines into a single massive party. It’s what made Baccano! the awesome show it was, to start out from zero while looking up the names of 28471 seemingly unrelated characters, to gradually growing attached to each of them and watching how their tales smash together into something that finally makes sense. It’s really an incredible experience, and I hope Durarara!! can do just as well, if not better, in this department.
In any case, looks like we’re back to Mikado’s side next episode. The preview shows glimpses of professional vending machine tosser Shizuo and “Sushi is good” Simon too, so I’m anticipating how their story will unfold.
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