Short Synopsis: Porfy meets an old dog who stubbornly keeps following him.
Highlights: An episode for the animals, and what a lovely episode it is!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Awww, that was such an adorable episode. It was incredibly cute and at the same time the conclusion was so powerful and awesome. What an adorable dog. What an absolutely adorable dog. To prevent myself from repeating myself even further, here’s this week’s summary:
Porfy is camping out again, wondering why he didn’t take a bus. Apollo meanwhile catches himself a mouse, and suddenly a huge dog appears, and cuddles up to Porfy. The two fall asleep that way, and the next day the dog continues to follow Porfy on his journey, even though Apollo doesn’t like it. When he sees a passing vehicle, he manages to get the driver to ride him to the next village, but the dog won’t move out of the car’s way until Porfy gives in and lets him ride as well, with Porfy obviously having to explain that the dog isn’t his.
Then, when the driver drops him off, Porfy gets hungry and buys a sandwich. He at first doesn’t want to give the dog anything, but eventually he shares his second sandwich with the animal. A local pastor then arrives, and takes interest in the dog. He notes that it’s already quite an old do, and how it could be following Porfy because it’s also travelling around. Apollo, while watching, meanwhile runs into a pretty female owl, which he begins to follow around and try to appease. When it starts raining, the two spend their time inside a hollow tree, while the female starts to like Apollo more and more.
The dog meanwhile decided to show Porfy around a bit, and takes him to a local stream where he could fresh him up a bit. While he’s taking a nap, Bernardo runs off with his bag, and Porfy chases it over and over. When Apollo hears Porfy, he decides to leave his new lover for Porfy. Porfy meanwhile is very angry at the dog for takng away his bag (including the tools from his father; always a touchy subject for the guy). But as it turns out, the dog just wanted to show Porfy a beautiful scenery (and beautiful it is!).
Porfy then looks around, and the dog has died. He creates a proper grave for it, and continues on with his journey with Apollo and the episode ends.
The creators made clever use of Apollo in this episode. Uusally, he’s the voice of reason for this series: whenever he’s freaking out, something bad is about to happen. In this case, he just didn’t like the dog, period. That did give the feeling that something was fishy about that dog, which the creaotrs really used to make it look a bit ambiguous. While in fact, the dog just knew it was about to die, and wanted to do this with some great scenery, next to someone who treated him well until the end.
I also finally noticed the pattern of this series: arc-climax-arc-climax-arc, where the arcs mostly are long, and the climaxes are short and powerful, although the first climax did take up quite a few episodes. What’s more interesting though is that each successive arc takes a different focus. The first one was slice of life, the second multi-episoded travel arcs, and now the third one features single-episoded travel arcs. I think that around episode 40 or 43, the next climax is going to come, where the final arc is going to wrap everything up.
My prediction is that the next climax will feature the bomb finally exploding between Isabella and Carlos. It’s probably going to be an arc where he finally had enough of Mina. In the final episodes, Porfy will then finally meet her (I get more and more the feeling that this will happen as late as possible) and run into Alecia.
So yes, something tells me that the final quarter of this series is going to be an amazing one. 🙂
