Baby Walkure (2024)

Babies' First Steps Towards Adulting?

This series is the fourth installment of the Baby Assassins franchise. The set up remains the same throughout the franchise: Chisako (Takaishi Akari) and Mahiro (Izawa Saori) are two young but highly competent assassins who just want a steady flow of work, but they would like to be otherwise left alone by the Assassins Guild that employs them. And the Assassins Guild, like any good, "benevolent" employer in the modern era, would like to develop their employees to have a wider skillset to leverage all the synergies in the assassination business. The entire franchise is a darkly comedic gun-fu martials arts series that obliquely critiques capitalistic corporate culture.

This jdrama continues directly from the three prior movies, but other than some shared characters (particularly among the service personnel who clean up after the assassinations) there's not a whole lot of continuity that anyone would need to know in order to enjoy this series. And so (at this point in 2026) if you've got an HBO Max subscription, and are curious whether you can watch this series without watching the prior movies, I'd say dive right in. You can always go back to the movies if you enjoy the characters, the action and the tone of the series.

This series is roughly divided into two halves. In the first half, the pair get reluctantly pulled into a "project" where one of the Guild's legendary assassins wants to come out of retirement to settle an old score. What's really going on in this part is a not so subtle critique of corporate training retreats. The pair's senpai for this section is Takashi (Kusakawa Takuya) who overacts pretty egregiously throughout, but his doing so seems to be as directed. The leads Takaishi and Izawa play things comparatively understated throughout the franchise in contrast to many of the more aggressive foils both within the Guild and without. That fact is is probably fairly essential to maintaining the comedic tone of the series between the action sequences.

The second half of the series has the pair split apart and assigned to two other departments. Mahiro is sent off to learn from and assist one of the Guild's liquidators who are assigned to kill assassins in the organization who have broken the rules. And Chisato is sent to work in Sales where issues of corporate politics and power harassment come to the fore. But the pair continue to live together, and ultimately work together to become partners again.

The acting of the leads remains superb and reaches a new peak in this series. Mahiro, outside of her extreme skills in hand to hand combat, is always mired in her debilitating social anxiety, and Chisato is outgoing, verging on manic at times. But the two actor's chemistry together is excellent to the point that it is natural to wonder if this series is, in fact, a GL. It's left ambiguous throughout the franchise, but I will reveal that there is a truly swoon-worthy moment in the final episode. Takaishi is the better actor as Chisato, and her career has recently gotten a well-deserved additional boost as she was the lead in this past winter's NHK asadora, The Ghost Writer's Wife. Much more surprising is Izawa's performance as Mahiro. Izawa was almost entirely a stunt performer prior to this series, but here she is not only anchoring the action sequences, but at one point she impressively cries directly to camera. She really should get more work, in my opinion.

If you enjoyed the prior movies, then this series is pretty much a must watch. There's probably a bit less time spent on the action sequences compared to the movies, and a bit more time on Chisato and Mahiro's slice-of-life interactions. In fact, one of the best episodes of the series has no diegetic action sequences at all (just a couple of brief flashbacks of memories). Nevertheless, there are good propulsive action sequences throughout the series with the same level of fight choreography that were seen in the movies. Thematically, there's also a bit more depth than the movies as the women take a few more steps towards adulthood, and the pair's relationship which has always been solid gets to bloom just a little.

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