Unless I’m out of line, we’ve already seen the latest episode of Tokyo Vice President. Tozawa is dead. Sato is in charge. Katagiri leaves. Misaki leaves behind anyone associated with yakuza life, as Erika did before her. Emi has a new job offer outside of MeichoDirty politics and back with her ex-boyfriend Shingo. Sam collects a payment from Mrs. Tozawa and rides his bike into the sunset. Jake is married to his job. Ties everything together pretty well, doesn’t it? Even the trailer that opened the series has already been accounted for, with that restaging of Katagiri and Jake’s encounter with Tozawa’s henchman Yabuki before this episode. Everything you can pay has been paid. I mean, the ending is literally called “Endgame.”
This seeps into even smaller stories. Look at Jake’s relationship with his colleagues Tin-Tin and Trendy. Tin-Tin getting stabbed is one thing, but even before that, I was wondering why Jake was so eager to get the guy back into his good graces after he put Samantha on the cover to spread a story. I would be very angry about that!
But now I think Jake recognized a kind of “all’s fair in love and journalism” instinct at work in Tin-Tin’s actions, an instinct he himself shares. In this episode, we learn that Jake himself burned a source, Trendy’s American boyfriend Jason, to get the information he needed from the FBI. Now Jason has been fired from the embassy and sent home, where he could face charges: thousands of miles from Trendy, the man who loves him. Trendy practically has to beat a confession out of Jake, who lies with alarming ease; He then tearfully tells Adelstein to stay away from him from now on. These two characters have brought a lot of nuance to Jake, something good supporting characters do.
Looking back at the show as a whole, it is fascinatingly structured in terms of its main antagonist. Shinzo Tozawa is a man of iron with feet of clay in the first season; Even as he performs unprecedented moves against Chihara-kai, he struggles to stay alive.
But that plot resolves itself off-screen between seasons. When he returns, Tozawa does so with a huge lead and there are only five minutes left on the clock. His men take down the other yakuza clans with ease. He has the future prime minister under his control almost instantly. The effect is very similar to what you see in a boss fight in a video game, where you lower his health meter only for him to reveal a new form and start the fight again. I don’t remember having seen anything like it.
And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids. But it’s not journalism or legitimate police work that brings down Tozawa. By contrast, writer-creator JT Rogers’ script is extremely bearish on the ability of these institutions to hold powerful people accountable, at least under the circumstances of the period portrayed in the show.
In the end, Katagiri’s maneuvers depend largely on squeezing the last juice out of his superior Nagata’s powers before his transfer, scheduled for a few hours later, a transfer that occurs precisely because She has used her powers well. Jake and Emi cannot publish their stories about Tozawa or political corruption in the Meicho not because Tozawa has an inside man at the newspaper, but because the editor of the National News section simply refuses to risk losing access to the halls of power over a story, any story. These are massive institutional problems, not the work of a charismatic crime boss and his henchmen. It’s not The Untouchablesis The wire.
And in the end, neither police work nor reporting defeats Tozawa. Murder yes. Knowing that neither he nor Jake can do the job, Katagiri hands the memo pointing out Tozawa as an FBI informant to Sato, in whose custody much of the gang remains safe for as long as they can. He does so not only knowing but hoping that Sato will hand over the file to the other bosses, who will rise up against Tozawa for being a rat. They do this, demanding that he commit suicide, unless he prefers that they do it for him. Tozawa takes the honorable path. Hey, there’s a first time for everything.
nobody in Tokyo Vice President, on both sides of the camera from director Josef Kubota Wladyka, seems especially torn by this. The guy is a multiple murderer, who begins this episode in the process in which they both execute his lover for sleeping with another boy. and taking over the entire Japanese government and business infrastructure. If it takes yakuza to stop a yakuza, I mean, the guy’s been hoisted by his own petard.
Furthermore, this happens in the same episode that is possibly the most disturbing and uncomfortable scene of the series: Jake explores the room where he saw his and Sam’s friend Polina murdered, and then watched as the gangsters and the next prime minister of Japan covered up that murder. . He is even shown to you from the same point of view as the security camera in black and white, complete with timestamp, as if he had somehow stepped out of the present and into that horrible moment in the past. No, an episode that makes us relive something so horrible that we are viscerally aware that no one will shed any tears for the person responsible, regardless of how he meets his fate.
That said, it’s a tremendously cynical ending, however enjoyable it may be for both us and the characters we care about. Jake, at least, has the excuse that Katagiri is covering up her true intentions until it’s too late. But for his part, Katagiri gives up on both the justice system and the fourth estate. All the values he and Jake have embodied and stood for over the last 18 episodes? Thwipp, straight out the window, ruled out by Katagiri in favor of extrajudicially executing a man to do the job. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but maybe it’s Tokyo’s real vice. was the friends we made along the way.
Could Do they still do it? Sure, I don’t see why not. Jake always has other stories to work on. Katagiri may or may not return if Ken Watanabe’s contract ends. Jake and Trendy’s fight seems like something created with a story in mind. The same goes for Mrs. Tozawa’s warning to Jake that she won’t forget how she failed to take down Tozawa with the surveillance tape, which it turns out she sent him. Boss Sato opens up a whole new world of narrative possibilities. We don’t know where Sam is going, what he will do when he gets there or what he will be like when he returns. Emi Unchained seems interesting to me. There is much left to explore.
But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay! So there’s a lot left to imagine, the way we daydream the futures of all kinds of characters in our favorite stories. I like the feeling that the world of Tokyo Vice President It will continue to spin even if we are not there to see it. Crimes will continue to be committed and police and journalists will continue to investigate them. There will always be people eating, drinking, working and fucking behind those big windows. The lights of Tokyo will always remain on.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about television forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York TimesandAnywhere that has it, In fact. He and his family live on Long Island.
