Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 33

Short Synopsis: It’s back to travel-arcs as Porfy runs into a bunch of streetpunks.
Highlights: A travel-arc it may be, but there’s plenty of development for Porfy.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Okay, so the inevitable happened: this series returned to the travel-arcs. Still, this episode was definitely among the better travel-stories of Porfy’s journey. It’s interesting: the smaller the arcs are, the more impact they make. This episode was excellent, and let’s hope that the next arcs will be so as well.

Porfy walks around a bit, and meets a guy who has trouble with his car. The guy acts very annoyed, but when Porfy fixes it he suddenly becomes very nice. It seems that he mistook Porfy for a bunch of street punks. He offers Porfy to come by for dinner, but Porfy needs to continue on and ask for Mina. A guy, a few years older than Porfy then offers Porfy a bit of bread, and he offers to help Porfy search for his sister. The two spend some time together, and they get some ice cream together (Porfy obviously notes that his mother’s ice cream was better).

As it turns out, Guido (the guy)’s parents are gone. He lives together with other guys who like him lost his parents. He offers Porfy to spend the night there. The guys all seem scary at first, but they greet Porfy nicely, apart from one of them, who keeps glaring at him. They turn out to be travelling, just like Porfy.

That night, they eat bread and soup (which of course doesn’t taste that well). Later, when everyone’s asleep, Porfy thinks how nice it must be to be together with everyone. Guido offers Porfy to join them, but Porfy declines. He needs to search for his sister. He also reveals that when he’s found Mina, he plans to return to Greece and restart the gasoline stand (foreshadowing?).

Georgio (the angry guy) then also, when nobody watches, threatens Porfy to leave as soon as possible the next day, saying that this isn’t the place for him to be. Porfy shrugs it off, but he does intend to leave the next morning. Guido is up early enough to accompany Porfy for a bit. He then tells Porfy a story about how his parents used to love cars before they died, but that car was taken away from them. They finally managed to track down the people who stole away that car. Porfy then says that he’ll help them retrieve that car.

Guido then gives him his purple jacket to wear, while Georgio looks at him very angrily. Later, Porfy and Guido arrive at a rich-looking house and Porfy manages to break into it, and they drive away. They split up later, where Guido says that he’ll hide the car, and Porfy tells him to take care. When he returns at the hideout, everyone’s suddenly gone. After a while, a couple of angry people (among the man from before) come looking for he car. They confuse Porfy for the leader of the pack due to the purple jumper that he’s wearing.

They chase him, until Porfy reaches a dead end, but Georgio manages to save him by distracting the men with a bunch of firecrackers, and they manage to escape. Porfy asks whether Guido has betrayed him, and why he did it, but Georgio just tells him to go away as soon as possible. He then gets beaten up by Guido for being so soft on Porfy. He was the idiot that let himself get betrayed. Guido meanwhile has already forgotten Porfy’s name and the episode ends.

Trust and betrayal is really a HUGE theme of the travel-arcs in this series. They lacked in the Sicily-arc and the Maximilian-arc, which probably is another reason why they felt dull. In this episode, everything comes together, though. Porfy gives his entire trust to the street punks, and never once critically thinks of why they’re so nice to him. Why would they give him bread if they have to feed so many mouths? And I guess that that was the purpose of the Sicily-arc and the Maximilian-arc: they meant to show the niceness of people: people are willing to take care of others, but there are just as many people who take advantage of this.

Porfy’s really going to emerge as a stronger person after this. This episode and episode 31 were a real example of his naivety ending him up in trouble. It’s also awesome to see that the background artists could flex their creative muscles again for this episode. Some of the shots looked absolutely gorgeous, and amongst the best that this series has shown.

Oh, and on a side-note, I got rather disturbed when I checked on my google-hits a few days ago. For the past seven and a half months, the term “Porfy Sucks” has generated 1487 friggin’ hits! Fouteen hundred! I mean, I can understand why someone would want to search for the term once or twice, but what are fourteen hundred people doing searching for a show that sucks? That’s likely even more than the people who are watching it, for christ’s sake! I’d love to hear from one of these people who entered the search term what made them search for it, because I’m baffled right now. I mean, I can understand that not many people are interested in this series, but this is getting ridiculous.