©YUJI KAKU/SHUEISHA, TWIN ENGINE, MAPPA
Content Warning: The episode discussed in this review contains themes of sexual assault and abuse. Reader discretion is advised.
So I watched this episode with my friend, and we both had the same reaction as the characters in the show when the Tensen’s underlings were discussing Mei as their “training partner”. We were mumbling under our breath, “Kill’em, kill’em, kill’em,” the entire time, while everybody else reasonably got progressively disgusted with the full implications of what was being talked about. This show is something else, because it runs the gamut of hitting you at your core with uncanny and disgusting subject matter without necessarily feeling gratuitous. Even when it gets close, you could argue that’s the point because the Tensen and these other creatures are so far removed from what it means to be human at this point that they fail to recognize people and their emotions as legitimate things that should be considered or cared for.
I do appreciate the parallel that episodes like this establish between characters like Tensen and Gabimaru. Gabimaru was raised in a ruthless ninja village where he probably participated in or, at the very least, helped facilitate just as many horrible things. He has only recently realized that he wants to see himself as a good person, thanks to his wife and some of the interactions he’s had on this island. He’s realizing that being human and feeling things doesn’t make you weak; instead, it can be an amazing motivator to help you find the strength that you might not have had before. Is it incredibly cliché? Yes, but I appreciate the way the show is communicating that message. Gabimaru is already an interesting character with a human side that I want to see developed so that he can return to his loving wife without any regrets. If he had to stoop to the level of these horrible creatures just to get the elixir, there’s a good chance he might not return to his wife the way he wanted to. So I appreciate how the deeper we go and the more disturbing things get, the more opportunities Gabimaru has to shine as a legitimate human being.
That being said, I’m glad we had that emotional hook in the episode because, if I try to look at it strictly from a power scaling perspective, I am very tempted to call bullshit. When I mentioned last week that some of the characters probably already know how to use Tao by accident, given the nature of the things they’ve already been able to do in their training, I didn’t expect two of those characters to grasp the full concept of it this quickly. Granted, in Chōbei’s case, they seem to be setting up an ultimate catch twenty-two. He’s a warrior who ruthlessly adapts to situations without really caring about his physical well-being. So there is a chance that they are setting up an emotional lesson for him by showing that he could potentially lose more of his humanity as he manipulates Tao more in a messy, ruthless way. If anything, he might be having the opposite character arc compared to Gabimaru.
The fight by the river, though, just felt a little harder to swallow due to how the fight was paced, and the delivery of the lesson of manipulating Tao. I didn’t find the fight choreography particularly interesting in this episode because it felt dragged on a bit too long with the back-and-forth between Gabimaru and Tamiya, the one-handed swordsman who seems like a lot of fun but is the idiot of the group, so there’s only so much appeal there. I laughed out loud when Fuchi just walked up and explained what Mei was trying to say to everybody in her broken dialect because he deciphered it off-screen. That felt weird, and I legitimately felt like I missed something. I would’ve appreciated it more if Gabimaru figured it out himself rather than having someone explain the message to him. Yes—he put in most of the work himself, and the finisher was legitimately cool-looking. It just felt like the journey to that resolution was a little clunky.
Rating:
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