Still a better love stor-oh wait I used that joke already
What They Say:
In a fictional version of New York City, called Hellsalem’s Lot, a young man named Leonardo Walch suddenly finds himself mixed in with an organization called Libra that fights super criminals. Blessed with super vision himself, he now battles to help save the world from a criminal called Femt, the King of Depravity.
The Review:
Content (warning as this review may contain spoilers): After last week’s fun, but incredibly dense episode, this week’s scales things back a bit. The tale we get this time around is a much simpler one and actually something of a love story. Of course given how simple that sounds on paper, you can always leave it to this show to make that premise as off the rails as utterly possible.
So things seem to be going south for Leo’s weird relationship with White and she seems to be upset with him. This puts him into a bit of a slump and on his way to work with Zapp, the two of them get attacked by a literal monster truck (it was only a matter of time, I suppose) and Leo of course gets taken hostage by it. Said monster truck belongs to one of the Elder 13 named Aligura, who’s after a man named Dog Hummer and his blood familiar Deldro who are in Libra’s custody.
At first Leo (and the audience) assumes, Aligura took him hostage in order to use his eyes to get to Dog and Deldro, but the actual reason is that she just wants to swap love stories with him (and torture him for a few giggles). She asks Leo about his love life and when he mentions White, she wonders why Leo doesn’t just ask her out. Of course she has her own little story to tell about her love life, and it’s a pretty bizarre one:
You see, Deldro was once her boyfriend but she wasn’t very happy with the way he looked. However when she ran into Dog, who’s something of a stud (and having Mamoru Miyano’s voice doesn’t hurt things either) she decided to drain both their bodies of blood, and inserted, Deldro’s blood into Dog’s body. If this sounds messed up to you, rest assured the show conveys it in a way that’s as funny as possible (just toss those organs in a blender) while still making it clear it’s pretty darn horrifying. As you can imagine, Deldro was none too pleased by that and opted to have him and Dog join Libra instead, but on the bright side being patched together seems to have made the two the best of bros. So much so that Dog opts to help Deldro get his revenge just because it’s what he wants (Dog himself seems to have stopped caring entirely). They get said chance at revenge when Libra comes with a plan to blow up the truck, and manage to send Aligura packing. Thus ends the creepy love story of Aligura and Deldro.
That’s not quite it for this episode as far as love stories are concerned though. The whole experience (along with being tortured over it) makes Leo to man up and ask White out on a date to the movies, making the two of them grow closer. All in all it’s a pair of love stories, one absurd, the other kind of cute, and both making for a good 24 minutes of pure entertainment as only this show can deliver. On the show’s larger picture it seems the boy from and Femt are both members of the Elder 13, and opted to sit this episode’s events out to have tea, but for the most part this is just another entry in the show’s usage of strange events to develop Leo’s character. Of course when said events are as much fun as this episode was, it’s certainly nothing to complain about.
On a side note, I just realized my two favorite episodes of the show so far both included long car chases(okay well technically a motorcycle/monster truck chase for this one but you get the idea). Not entirely sure what the correlation is between car chases and amazing episodes are, but this show seems extremely good at them, so whatever.
In Summary:
The show dishes out another super fun episode this week and conveys a pair of somewhat opposing love stories. It’s still not entirely clear what the goal of the show’s story is in the long run, but so long as we keep getting episodes like this one I can live with that. So far this show is a strong contender for anime of the year for me, and I’m hoping it can keep up this level of momentum.
Grade: A+
Streamed By: FUNimation
