[Mini Review]
The five year gap between Durarara's first season and Shou may in fact be its greatest weakness. It's rather abrupt seeing these characters after so long, brought to life by a new, rougher art-style and now entangled in a complicated web of relations with new characters we don't yet know; it all is a little alienating at first, especially when the first episodes of this new season are largely spent parading around the setting of Ikebukuro, a large deviation from the action-packed finale of season one. I can't hold that against Shou, however. Its job isn't easy. It needs to recover old fans of the franchise while attracting new ones, set the ground-work for a second season that will be spread over three cours, while still having a definite narrative of its own that has a beginning and end, and it had to accomplish all of this in just 12 episodes. When you look at it that way, it's actually quite amazing Shou turned out as well as it did.
True, the beginning is slow and rather abrupt in its presentation, and while the writing is good, Durarara as a franchise has never held it accountable over fun action sequences and crazy characters. Sometimes I can't help but feel that Shou is simply adding things in order to make everything more complicated, because for all the setting-up it does for multiple characters arcs later on in !!x2, there are a few times it simply doesn't go anywhere, wasting precious time in a franchise whose pacing basically is already defined by being rushed and incoherent.
That's when it becomes frustrating, and that's when I sincerely get angry at this show, because it's too caught up in its own insanity to actually concentrate on the bundle of things it has on its hands that are actually really interesting, a pit-fall its older cousin Baccano! was able to side-step with flying colors. But I know that's redundant and unfair. If there's anything Shou was able to do, it was to define Durarara!! as its own entity, one that promises to end up in a very awesome place indeed by the end of all three cours of !!x2. And speaking of which.
What really redeems Shou in the end as its own entertaining narrative is the rather excellent last few episodes. When it actually has all the prerequisites of its own limited existence out of the way, Shou turns the excitement level up to 11, grabbing whatever plot-threads it needs and accelerates into an extremely satisfying ending, one that not only ends on several awesome but equally tortuous cliffhangers, but sets up the real narrative of !!x2, as the story of Mikado Ryūgamine and the crazy-ass city that surrounds him reveals its true colors and propels the hype level into levels yet uncharted. Shou is really good at what it sets out to do, and even if you don't like this cour for its bipolarity, you can't dispute that for Durarara!!x2, it's absolutely imperative.
Final Verdict: 7/10
P.S: "Then why are you smiling?"
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