English Dub Review: Nyaight of the Living Cat “The Cat Is a Harsh Master”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kunagi and the gang survive the first night of the Nyandemic.

OUR TAKE

This brings us to what seems to be the end of the first arc of the story, with our main group of survivors managing to make it through the first night of this deadly change to their world. The episode definitely has its highlights, such as Kunagi hopping on a motorbike and imagining the horde of cats chasing him as one giant spirit cat (which personally would have made it hard for me to drive that fast but whatever), but I was genuinely worried that I would not have much new to say about this episode, similar to what happened last week where stuff certainly happened, but nothing all that new. Especially since they’ve been milking the joke of “human instincts are to play with cats and take videos and photos when they’re cute to the point that they lose their self-preservation instincts”, which…okay, fair enough, but the joke itself is kinda worn out by this point. Luckily, we got some resolution for this portion of the story with the main four getting out alive…for the moment. We finally loop back around to the first episode with Tanishi eventually getting cat-ified and Tsutsumi getting separated somehow, but with Kunagi and Kaoru escaping the city to look for her.

So, now where does the story go from here? Well, the trappings of their former society have fallen away, shed like old cat fur, and we transition from a “Night of the Living Dead” parody to a “28 Days Later” parody, with characters far from civilization and already finding pockets of survivors…or at least that’s what they’re on the look out for. Perhaps next episode, they’ll come across an old mansion turned military compound run by Christopher Eccleston where he will have a bunch of cats tied up for Kunagi to let loose and turn them all. Regardless of what zombie movies they homage later, I’m just glad to see the story move on so that covering this series becomes a lot easier to do. But there’s still no clear sign of what Kunagi’s whole deal is with his cat like reflexes and lack of memories. It seems like we got a hint at it this episode as something flashed in his head, but that’s not likely to be the last bit of it that’s revealed. And based on the title for next week’s episode, it seems we’re doing some Mad Max stuff too! Guess we’ll see how that goes.