Black Torch Episode 5, titled “Young Gunz”, is the best the show has looked or moved all season, and it finally starts paying off a mystery it has been sitting on since episode one.
The episode opens with the Bureau trying to figure out what Koga actually wants with Rago, with Jiro immediately floating the theory that Koga is simply in love with him. Reiji shuts that down and starts assessing the situation properly while Jiro stays Jiro. It takes less than a minute for the two of them to remind you why their dynamic is one of the show’s best assets.
Koga’s Motive Is Simple, and Rago Does Not Care
Koga’s actual goal is not complicated. He wants to exploit Rago’s strength to become the dominant mononoke, the undisputed king of that world. He hates humans, seeing them as weak creatures who overcompensate by acting tough, a worldview Black Torch has flirted with before through characters like Muzan and the Upper Moons in Demon Slayer. The framing is familiar, but Koga sells it.
What the episode does not prepare you for is Rago’s total indifference. He has no interest in Koga’s vision of mononoke dominance and gives it zero thought. Watching Koga unravel over that rejection is unexpectedly funny, right up until it becomes clear how much of his identity depends on an alliance Rago never agreed to.
Elsewhere, the interaction between Ms. Kushumi and Shiba adds another layer, with Koga’s knowledge of Jiro’s father unsettling Jiro more than anything else this week. The show wisely leaves that thread unresolved for now, letting Reiji and Ichika quietly sit with their own failure to help in the field instead of turning it into a big moment.
The Killing Stone Mystery Starts to Crack Open
Episode 5 also introduces Fuyo, a 500-year-old mononoke who resembles a pixie and traps her targets in illusions built from their buried memories. Through her power, Jiro and Rago are forced to relive a confrontation with the giant mononoke Amagi, a sequence that finally makes Rago’s past feel like it has real weight.
Jiro and Reiji’s investigation of the subterranean holding area gets to the real mystery: the Killing Stone, the monolith that held Rago during his long sleep before the merge with Jiro. The episode examines how that seal actually worked for the first time, and what breaking it would have required, which starts narrowing down who had the motive and the means to free him. It raises more questions than it answers, which is exactly the right move five episodes in.
The animation is the other big story here. The opening minutes already show cleaner lines and sharper movement than anything in the first four episodes, and once the Okamoto mononoke fight kicks in, the production is clearly operating on another level. It is the kind of action Black Torch has been promising since the premiere, without fully delivering, until now.
The show still has work to do in making its cast feel essential. The early character introductions moved too fast for most of them to land, and after a mission that wrapped up in a single episode, the story pivots straight into another training arc centered on everyone confronting their personal demons.
That structural issue is real. But Young Gunz is the closest Black Torch has come to justifying the faith early fans put in it, and if this animation quality holds, the back half of the season has a real shot at delivering.