‘Tokyo Vice’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: Boss of All Bosses

“This reminds me of The Sopranos”: Now that’s a thought you love to have. If a show is doing something reminiscent of the show that effectively made all of your subsequent favorite shows possible, then it’s doing something right. Watching a pair of gangster idiots escalate a meaningless offense into a brutal murder and clumsy coverup? That’s that Sopranos magic, baby!

The entire Sato storyline this episode of Tokyo Vice (Season 2, Episode 4 “Like a New Man”) feels very very North Jersey. After first delighting his new love interest Erika’s kid by play-fighting with him — the kind of humanizing detail The Sopranos adored — he’s sent by Boss Ishida to travel to the middle of nowhere with Hayama, Ishida’s asshole right-hand man. They’re supposed to pick up guns from an ex-Chihara-kai guy named Ota (Takao Kin), a wild and woolly sort. 

They wind up getting stuck there for the night, and it seems as if the two older men have it in for Sato. When he excuses himself to take a piss, they jump him upon his return and force him to do that knife-finger thing from Aliens. But Ota sees it as the perfect opportunity to get back at Hayama for insulting his sexual prowess and stabs him in the leg. Before long, Ota has his throat slit and they’re setting fire to his cabin to cover up the murder before staggering out into the snow. In Sopranos terms it’s like if “Whoever Did This” led directly into “Pine Barrens.” Go a bit further back and you’ve got the Billy Batts situation from GoodFellas. This is tried and true gangster storytelling, and it works.

Unfortunately for Sam, intelligence is also one of his qualities, and the minute he notices his briefcase is unlatched, he fingers her for a spy. Where this is headed who can say, but if I were Sam I’d come clean. I suppose she runs the risk of him running his mouth, but he seems like a shrewd guy as well as a hilariously idealized hunk, and I think he’d be more likely to say “Okay, I understand” than “I’m calling the police.” But that’s a hell of a chance to have to take.

The whole storyline hinges on the incredibly tense sequence in which Sam roots around in Masa’s office for the plans. You can hear the chop-chop-chop of Masa slicing carrots in the background, letting you know he’s still occupied…but then he cuts himself, and it’s a race against time to see if he reaches the bathroom before Sam sneaks out of his office and acts like she was in the bathroom the whole time. This is incredibly simple, incredibly effective genre storytelling by writer Ashley Darnell. Ditto the way director Josef Kubota Wlakdyka’s camera stays on Samantha the entire time Masa’s in his office looking for his keys, forcing the audience to sit and wait to learn of her fate right alongside her.

Speaking of taking chances, Jake is really going for it this go-round. Though he does call things off with Misaki the minute she asks him to given the news that her main man Boss Tozawa has returned to Tokyo, he winds up tailing Tozawa himself after a chance sighting. (Jake was in the process of blowing the lid off the story of the legal basis Katagiri’s new unit is using to arrest and detain yakuza.) 

Jake follows Tozawa to nothing less than the final stage of his seizure of “boss of all bosses” status. Tozawa had secretly planted the seeds of his takeover during his absence, when his underlings authorized Chihara-kai take-backs of disputed territory. This was a trap, a way to make Ishida and his outfit look greedy and without honor, so that the other organizations would take Tozawa’s side over Ishida’s upon his return. Dumping his nominal boss out the window of his high-rise with the help of his own men is the final step before all-out war on Chihara-kai, and Jake literally sees the body hit the floor. (I appreciate his realistically shocked reaction: “Oh, fuck! Fuck!” Jake’s combination of guile and guilelessness is what makes the character work.)

Also we find out (unless it was already apparent to everyone but me) that Emi and Shingo aren’t married, just boyfriend and girlfriend, and that she’s kept him away from her bipolar brother, who attacked her mother. Also Erika finds out that Sam and Sato used to date, which all of them seem refreshingly chill about, for the time being anyway.