Banana Fish Episode 16 Review: Lo, The Poor Peacock

Your Otaku Friend in Japan

Episode 16, Lo, the Poor Peacock, shelves the suspense and foreboding and brings out the comedic sides of Ash and the rest of the Banana Splits. This week’s episode of Banana Fish will have you cracking up from start to finish!

Plot

Ash manages to evade capture and get both himself and Dawson out unscathed. Unfortunately, he witnesses Max and Ibe getting captured by some guards and has to return to help out his friends.

Episode Highlights

The Great Escape: We’ve seen Ash in action before; he is a tactical genius! In this week’s episode we see him carry out an escape from a maximum security mental ward with a Banana Fish-ed out Dawson in tow! He’s crawling through vents, climbing up elevator shafts, taking down guards left and right…

Dude Looks Like a Lady: Everyone always says how pretty Ash is with his blonde hair and emerald green eyes. He certainly turns a lot of heads. So the natural next step is to have Ash cross-dress as a nurse… right? For a good bit of the episode Ash disguises himself as a female nurse, and he’s so good at it, he manages to attract the unwanted advances of one of the other doctors.

Always Time for Some Laughs: Despite the high stakes life or death situations there were a lot of comedic moments in this week’s episode that kept things from going too dark.

Themes & Trivia

Meaningful Title: All the episode titles have been references to novels and short stories by famous American authors. This week’s episode is no different, borrowing its title from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story ‘Lo, the Poor Peacock’, written in 1935. When it was originally submitted for publication it was rejected, seeing a posthumous publication in Esquire magazine in 1971.

Comments

This week’s episode was much more lighthearted than the other episodes to date. I guess they wanted to give us a break from all the doom and gloom of the series and don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that, I quite liked seeing Ash lightening up a bit. However, it kind of doesn’t fit in with the overall tone of the series, then having it juxtaposed with Dino’s pissing contest with his replacement… eh, it’s a little off-putting. It’s not like I was expecting every episode to be nonstop action and explosions, but, this was a bit out of place.

Also, any episode that has me silently cheering for Dino to get over on someone is definitely doing something wrong…

Here We Go Again

This week’s episode is a bit of a shift from the series’s usual doom and gloom seeing some lighter slapstick moments from our tortured protagonist, Ash. It’s a nice reprieve, but, a bit out of keeping with the tone of the series… But, even I can admit, it was a lot of fun to watch!

I’ll be back next week with another BANANA FISH review, but in the meantime, be sure to check out MANGA.TOKYO’s other amazing Fall 2018 reviews!!