Binge-Watching: Odd Taxi, Episodes 3-4
In which I praise this show’s ability to show-don’t-tell, a one-episode dive into gacha hell brings forth the theme of toxic dreams, and the mysteries grow ever murkier and more dangerous.
Unspoken Insight
The phrase “show don’t tell” gets overused a lot in media criticism. There are plenty of situations where it makes sense to be clear and obvious about what’s going on in a story and what your audience is supposed to take away from it. As a wise man once said, “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” But that doesn’t mean show-don’t-tell is a bad maxim at all. You just need to understand where, when and why to use it. As I mentioned in my last Odd Taxi post, it can be very rewarding to let an audience figure out things for themselves. And that doesn’t just apply to story and mystery; it’s important for characters and their emotions as well. Seeing a character act a certain way will have a much bigger impact than simply telling your audience how they are. You can still have other characters talk explicitly about that character, but generally speaking, actions need to back those words up. Reinhard von Lohengramm would still be an overly ambitious glory-seeker with good intentions but dark underlying impulses even without everyone else in Legend of the Galactic Heroes commenting on that fact. All that commentary does is drive that point home (and let us know that the other characters understand Reinhard as well because they’re all fairly smart). And sometimes, you don’t need that extra clarification for an audience to understand what makes a character tick.
Case in point? Odokawa. This is a guy who rarely talks about himself and is rarely talking about by other people, at least not in objective terms. If you’re relying on explicit descriptions to understand him, you’ll be out in the cold. But once you start looking at his actions, you start to form a very good picture of him. He barely flinches with a gun in his face, and he even needles Dobu to rile him up and distract him (”More importantly, that toy is really distracting.”) Any ordinary taxi driver would be a panicked mess if they were held hostage at gunpoint, but Odokawa doesn’t just keep his cool, he freaking outsmarts Dobu and brings the cops crashing down on them before Dobu realizes what’s going on, all without breaking a sweat. He’s almost eerily calm throughout the whole encounter, like he barely factors his own life into the risk equation of defeating a dangerous armed criminal. He’s not suicidal, but he’d rather risk death than be forced to deal with something like helping a yakuza. Just from this one scene, we can tell that Odokawa’s seen some shit, and very little fazes him anymore. And he’s also got a strong sense of justice that he’s not afraid to flex when faced with situations he feels are somehow wrong. Whether it’s staring down a gunman or telling off his friend for lying to score a hot date online, Odokawa takes no shit and gives no shit. Which only makes it all the more notable that Miho, of all people, is able to shake his composure, even just a bit. He’s self-aware enough to be reasonably suspicious who an attractive young woman would be interested in a nobody like him, but he’s also willing to risk being vulnerable around her in a way we don’t see him be with anyone else. It’s all subtle stuff, but it’s obvious to anyone paying even a little attention, and it makes Odokawa an incredibly rich character despite how little direct explanation he’s given.
Gacha Hell
Now, on the other hand, sometimes you do need direct explanation to make a story work. And luckily, Odd Taxi is just as good on that front. Episode 4 puts us right in the head of a new character, Tanaka, as he narrates his life story to us explaining how he got hooked on gacha and how that messed with his life. This is a case where a character is explicitly talking to the audience and telling us about himself, but that story is also colored by his current perspective on events, which gives us double insight into who he is. One one level, he’s telling us the literal events that happened to him and his mindset during them. On another level, his current feelings about what happened are also critical character information that aren’t directly explained to us, but we can pick up on all the same. Those kinds of little character-refocusing touches are what keep this episode from being just a weird exposition dump. We’re not just being told some guy’s story, we’re given a personal perspective on his life and the decisions that led him to this point. And by the time it’s over, one of Odd Taxi’s main themes has finally started to manifest: the tragedy of being trapped by a destructive dream.
See, Tanaka isn’t just some random schlub who got addicted to the latest gambling simulator and spent all his money for a jpeg of anime tiddies or whatever. He’s a guy who puts incredible weight on the idea of fate and destiny. Oh, sure, he’s self-aware about how dumb it is to read deeper signs into his bird dying the same day he lost his lucky gacha pull, but deep down, he can’t help but assign meaning to it. As a child, he fully bought into the idea of using erasers as social status in class, even nobody else treated it all that seriously. His desire to win a game no one else was even playing let him to spend 1,000 dollars of his dad’s money on an eraser that never even showed up, and by then his class had already moved on to other interests (Although we have seen that particular eraser before... how did Miho get her hands on it, I wonder?). He was waging a whole-ass war in his head, a war with real life-or-death stakes, but he was too self-centered to realize that he was the only one who even really cared. Or maybe he did notice, but his desire to assign meaning to it was too hard to resist. Either way, now that he’s an adult, playing Not-Farmville isn’t just a time sink, it’s a mission. A mission to redeem his childhood self by spending way too much money on an ultimately meaningless trinket- in other words, the exact same thing he did as a child, except this time he’ll actually get it! So you see, it’s completely different! This time it actually matters!
But it doesn’t matter. And even if he hadn’t lost that lucky pull, it still wouldn’t matter. He’s have his brief moment of elation, his catharsis at finding meaning in the world, and then... life would go on, and he’d still be miserable, short on cash, and self-obsessed to a dangerous degree. His mistake as a child wasn’t spending too much money on something small, it was not realizing how meaningless it was before it was too late. His life felt adrift, so he tried to assign it meaning from an external source, but that was doomed to failure even if that dodo ended up in his virtual farm. After the rush of victory had passed, he’d be just the same bitter, myopic guy who sacrifices meaningful human connection for meaningless symbolic victories that only mattered in his chaotic swirl of a mental state. He styled himself a rebel, a warrior, a man on a divine mission fighting a destined fight, but at the end of the day, he’s just a dude driving himself deeper into the muck by chasing an impossible dream for cheap validation. And even if he recognizes that fact, he can’t stoop himself from sinking down, down, down. Especially now that he’s found the perfect scapegoat to pin his hopes and dreams upon, the perfect arch enemy to devote the meaning of his life to stopping. The man who ruined his pull, who destroy his quest in failure, and who now carries around that same dumb eraser Tanaka tried and failed to get all those years ago. How perfectly, terribly fated it all seems.
The Plot Thickens
Alright, damn. That’s a hell of a lot of words for a character we basically just met. Consider it a testament to Odd Taxi’s quality that it wrung such a compelling mini drama in the space of 23 minutes before connecting it to the larger plot. That larger plot, meanwhile, is still developing in the background. Some new information: the missing girl is the runaway daughter of some guy who’s friends with a yakuza boss, and she ran away because she discovered that connection. Dobu is working for that boss, hence his interest in Odokawa, and he’s got the older of those two police brothers in his pocket. On the bright side, it seems like the girl might be in safe hands, assuming that’s really her talking through a third party. On the downside, Odokawa is now being threatened by even more people, and not even his friends are likely to be safe. His doctor’s already vanished, and as much as I love Miho’s dorky capoeria, I doubt it’ll be enough to defend against armed assailants. Unless she also knows more than she’s letting on, which is still a very strong possibility. Still so many questions, still way too few answers. Either way, Odokawa better watch his back, because at this rate, the entire city is gonna end up gunning for him.
Odds and Ends
-Sir, you are 41, please step away from the 18-year-old.
-”He was on the phone?!” dkfgjhsfjhdsf oh my god I’m dying that was such a perfect misdirect
-...do taxis usually have an SOS button? I guess they must.
-okay but what kind of tragic backstory would give these guys a grudge against taxi drivers
-Did they watch the sunrise together? Aaaaaw.
-”Why not enjoy a sherry and a fudge brownie while strolling up the west coast?” lol whut
-”You got upset when you didn’t know what it meant?” “I could understand the nuance.” will you two just kiss already oh my god
-”We’re shooting all four at once.” “Oh yeah. No wonder I’m not hungry.” skdjfhskdfh you absolute disaster
-”They’re never concepts that applied to me.” ... asexual Odokawa canon?
-”No. That’s an exaggeration. Actually, a lie.” Pfft. Yeah, classroom hierarchies are never sorted fairly, whatever metric you use.
-EW NO WHY THE TRUMPFACE
Aaaah, good to be back to this show. See you next time!
