Golden Kamuy Season 2 - Does it Make the Slow Season 1 Worth Sitting Through?

After the first season of Golden Kamuy I wasn't really sure what I was going to get in the second season, but I certainly didn't expect what I got. The first season of Golden Kamuy was largely focusing on introducing many of the characters and learning about the world, specifically the Ainu, people who still live as tribes of hunters in an era of Japan that has moved beyond the era of Samurai. For one reason or another, there are a few different groups looking to track down a cache of Ainu Gold whose location is hidden as a series of tattooed skins of former prisoners.

Come the end of season one there were effectively three groups established to be involved in this. You had our main character, a man who picked up the nickname 'The Immortal Sugimoto', and his desire to find the gold to fulfill a promise to an old war buddy. He teams up with an Ainu girl named Asirpa who may or may not be the daughter of the man who created the Tattoos on the prisoners, and The Escape King Shiraishi who is one of the former prisoners with the tattoos. Another group of people is composed largely of former prisoners with the Tattoos led by Hijikiata, a former Samurai of the Shinsengumi, who seeks the gold to fund an overthrow of the current regime. The third major group is The Hokkaido Seventh Division. Led by a man who went a little crazy after brain damage suffered in a war between Russia and Japan, Tsurumi seeks the gold to cause his own Coup and keep Hokkaido independent from the rest of Japan.

I don't want to go into who is aligned with who in great detail because in a lot of ways many peoples loyalties are suspect. Hijikata clearly knows more then he lets on and has a lot of secret plans he regularly employs, and Tsurumi himself was an intelligence officer and he specializes in devious tactics and spies. This isn't even getting into potential influence of Nationalist Russian parties who may be involved, the belief is that the one behind the tattoos may actually have been from Russia. Never in this season does Sugimoto feel like he can really trust the people around him.

Where the show really picks up from season one is there really isn't a need to set up the story anymore, so where season one was a bit slow and sluggish at times, season two moves at a very rapid pace. Things are constantly moving forward, and Tsurumi being the main force behind the chaos is an absolute delight as an antagonist. See, the show was always included some pretty strange and offbeat humor, but that is ramped up to an extreme degree the more The Seventh Division is active. The show starts with them recruiting a crazy taxidermist to fake skins with tattoos, and he has this weird animal suit with an elephant trunk for a codpiece. That is just how it starts, and it just gets stranger. I love how the Seventh Division acts and feels like nothing else in the show, something that makes sense considering the instability of their leaders mental state.

There is a weird part of me that wants the Seventh Division to win this struggle just because they seem to be having so much fun, even though they kind of assholes. Despite the obvious insanity of Tsurumi, you would be mistaken to count him out as he is exceptionally clever and efficient. The joyous mask of insanity can fool you, his plans run very deep and his ability to see them through and adjust to the situations presented to him is incredible.

While he may be the main focus through this season, Hijikata himself is also scheming behind the scenes with his own plans. He may not be the driving force this season that Tsurumi was, but the seeds have been planted for the future seasons to come. And that is something that season two does well beginning to end, keeping the story moving all while making sure to constantly introducing new elements to the narrative that can come up later. It does this in a way that doesn't overwhelm you with information and doesn't derail the current happenings.

It's hard to put my finger on this point because it's not really a plot hole or things happening for the convenience of the plot, but many times characters just feel like they are in places that they need to be for the purpose of the plot they want to tell. I'll avoid details, as it happens near the end of the season, but there is a character named Ushiyama, who is an excellent marksman. He ends up in what is essentially a snipers nest and makes a surprise shot, but when he did it I was thinking, 'Wait, when did he get up there?' and I thought about it and realized he just wasn't really doing anything at all up until this point. He did have time to get up there, and it makes sense why he would, you just kind of forget he was even involved up until this point. This happens a fair bit in the show. It's not something that is largely an issue, but it is noticeable after a while.

There is an amazing increase in quality moving from season one to season two. It's almost like this run was a bit of an apology for how slowly the first season could move. Nothing that happens in the show feels like it's a waste of time, the plot constantly advances, the action is fantastic, and the story gets more and more interesting the more you learn. Golden Kamuy was definitely one of the seasons bigger surprises for me due to the incredible jump in quality from the first season. So long as you don't mind the rather excessively slow build of the first season, the second season makes it worth the wait.