![]() The ransom turns out to be fake, however, a scam by Polina’s ex who could care less about her disappearance. You can’t blame her for wanting to find Polina - she even goes so far as to offer up the last of her savings for her new club in order to pay off a ransom. Samantha’s primary character trait has been using people to get what she wants, so it’s hard to say which of her actions are genuine and which are calculated. Like her fling with Sato, the kiss lands ambiguously. Jake promises to look into it and, still high, Samantha kisses him. Samantha suffers the writer’s creepy advances long enough to learn that Polina has been put on Tozawa’s sex cruise on a boat called “Yoshino,” to earn money to pay back her debt. ![]() The only way to get this information out of a greasy, Yakuza-obsessed writer is to smoke meth) with him. The show’s expat characters, Jake and Samantha (Rachel Keller), are trying to uncover information about the disappearance of Samantha’s friend Polina, who was in debt to a Tozawa-backed host club. Worse still, Tozawa threatens to go after his family, leaving Katagiri shaken and paranoid. Things take a turn for the fatal - Miyamoto is taken out of the picture by Tozawa, and Katagiri loses his strongest lead. ![]() While Miyamoto insists he’s a good guy who has made bad decisions, his attempts to perpetuate a relationship with Tozawa show that he hasn’t learned his lesson. Katagiri was suspicious of this, and his suspicions are confirmed. Episode seven revealed that Miyamoto is working with Tozawa, using the gang leader as a source of information in exchange for tipping him off about the occasional bust the cops are planning. In Katagiri’s case, he has to wrestle information out of Miyamoto (Hideaki Itō), a fellow cop who has spent most of his appearances on the show leching at women and minimally helping protagonist Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort). If anything, being shown to be happy, especially early in an episode, is a guarantee that serious misfortune is coming your way. Of course, a neo-noir crime show can’t let any of its characters be happy for too long. Taking him off the street would be a boon for the city’s police department. Tozawa’s operations range from protection fees to drug and human trafficking. The episode opens with a rare moment of happiness for Detective Katagiri (Ken Watanabe), who enjoys breakfast with his wife and daughters, and comments optimistically on catching one of the Yakuza’s bigger fish - secretly-ailing gang leader Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida). What I didn’t predict was that it would introduce even more mysteries at the last minute, ending on a cliffhanger that leaves the fate of a major character hanging in the balance. ![]() Yes, it’s the last episode we’re getting for the foreseeable future, and yes, it attempts to capture some of the frantic escalation and big decisions a finale should have, but there’s nothing final about “Yoshino.” Last week, I closed out my recap of the penultimate episodes predicting that the show wouldn’t be able to resolve its many, many narrative threads. It feels like false advertising to refer to “Yoshino,” the eighth and final episode of Season 1 of “Tokyo Vice,” as a finale. Just when things seem to be coming together, the show’s finale throws another storyline into the already-crowded mix.
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