Welcome all, to another week of Migi & Dali! This week Eiji’s past is investigated, a betrayal is discovered and Best Girl makes a surprising return. For those who have kept up with the series, you can probably figure out where this is going. So without further ado, lets dive in!
At the core of the episode we have Dali and his goal of getting information from Eiji. How is he going to do it? Become his friend? Sneak around his house again? Interrogate his friends? Seduce… him? That’s right, Dali’s plan is to bring back Sali and go full teasing-dom on Eiji to seduce him into spilling the beans. I get it, if I was ignorant of the truth I’d fall for Sali to, Dali makes a sexy dark haired femme fatale. And it’s not like Dali will won’t go to far of course, all he needs is to get him alone to try some hypnosis tricks on. This is nice, it feels like Migi & Dali is coming back to the kind of weird I enjoy, the stuff that isn’t fetishy but still situationally funny. And it’s the situation, the consequences of Sali’s return, that makes the episode fun.
What consequences am I talking about? Well obviously Migi finds out Sali has returned and interrupts the whole thing. Migi is a valiant child and they made a promise! He won’t let Eiji trick her or steal her from him! The only thing to do is to search for her, to reunite as true lovers. Real quick, I love how Akiyama was able to piece together a real sketch from Migi’s doodles, that was hilarious and watching them bond as legitimate friends before the inevitable implosion of the twins was great. Getting back to Sali, it should come as no surprise how possessive Migi gets. She’s the first girl to give him the time of day since their mother, and he’s always been more concerned with living a normal life than getting revenge. So it makes sense when he’s inevitably turned down why he acts so crushed and defeated.
This actually leads to a surprisingly wholesome set of scenes with the Sonoyama’s comforting him through the experience. Watching Migi & Dali, sometimes you forget that there are legitimately good people in this town. And the Sonoyama’s? They actually care for their “Hitori”, their adopted child. They do their best to cheer him up, whether it be jokes, drinks or even the dad admitting that not all hope is lost and that Migi should try again in the future. Naturally this leads to him mucking up Dali’s plan, interrupting a study date and professing his love only to be pushed out a window and figure out who Sali really is. Still it was loving advice given by a caring father meant to cheer up his adopted son. It’s sweet, and I like this reminder that the twins could have a happy life here if they would just take it.
As for how this screws up Dali’s plan? Well remember, Dali is Sali! So this whole time Sali is cheating on Migi with Eiji? That’s actually Dali seducing Eiji while dressed as Sali whom Migi loves. Yeah, its a bit of a clusterfuck in the best possible way. And the wildest part? It works! Dali is actually able to hypnotize Eiji into admitting what happened to their mother. Turns out she was climbing up his window on Christmas Eve and, in his panic as a child at seeing a random blond woman at his window, he accidentally pushed her out of it. That explains her death in the streets, the button, how Eiji is responsible for it, everything. Yet it also introduces a whole new set of questions. Questions like: Why was she there to begin with?
I have my theories on this. Maybe Eiji is related to her in some way, or she was going crazy and mistook him for one of her sons, or maybe she knew that his mother was an abusive bitch and was trying to rescue him from the home she was working at as a maid. We can’t know just yet how she was involved with the family. One thing is for certain though, Reiko is doing her damnedest to hide her existence from her son and the village at large. Telling him there are no blond women in Origon village, denying her existence, while at the same time being unaware she actually died. It’s not that surprising the mom is responsible for everything, but I do like how Migi & Dali keeps finding good reasons to pass the suspicion around.
Finally for this weeks epilogue the brothers finally come to a head. I’ve been expecting this for a while, ever since Sali first showed up really. So it’s nice that Migi & Dali is actually paying that off and making use of it. It was inevitable that Migi would figure out what Dali was doing, and that he’d be rather pissed about it. I’m really looking forward to how their split relationship effects not only their plans but them as people. Because remember, the village at large is only aware of one of them. So if Migi takes over the day to day life… Dali basically has to go into hiding, with 0 human contact, a persona non grata in the village at large. I can’t imagine that will be easy for him, especially while trying to figure out how to apologize to Migi. Should make for a good arc.
So yeah, all in all I think Migi & Dali is back in form. The weirdness has returned to normal, more acceptable levels of weird now that the baby stuff is over, and the brothers interpersonal conflict is important both for their own growth and actually discovering who the murderer is. I’m looking forward to where the show goes from here and, so long as it doesn’t get baby levels of weird again, it should be a good time!
