Denser than fog
What They Say:
In a fictional version of New York City, called Hellsalem’s Lot, a young man named Leonardo Watch 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):
It would appear that Blood Blockade Battlefront is making up for last week’s super simple episode by making this one as dense as possible. So dense in fact it almost feels like you’d need a guillotine to cut it and it still might not be enough. For any other show this would be pretty bad but for this series it’s a true return to form after taking a bit of a step down the last time, and dense as it is, it’s dense with lots of interesting material.
So due to said density of the episode it might be easier to talk about the main part of the episode first and the Black/White stuff second. For the former, Zapp goes around being well…Zapp and that means sleazing over girls, stuffing himself with food and all around being a jerk. That comes back to bit him arse when another Blood Breed shows up in town and ends up getting into a brawl with someone else. Said someone turns out to be Zapp’s mentor, Raju Jugei Shizuyoshi(oh Nightow and his bizarre naming sense), who is known as a Blood Battle God. Raju manages to turn to the Blood Breed into a Zhen Tai Dan (for simplicity’s sake I’ll just call it ZTD for short) which is an egg like shell that serves as a Blood Breed’s true form.
Apparently he’s been going around slaying high level Blood Breeds for the last few decades and has become so skilled that he comes off as even more of an arrogant jerk than Zapp himself, which would certainly where he gets that part from. He’s also none too pleased Zapp’s overall suckiness (and rips on him so bad you almost feel sorry for him) and decides to take him back for training. The others agree Zapp’s pretty much worthless scum but they still need him around on the team so they try to appease him. He agrees under the condition that Zapp passes his test of rendering the ZTD non-hostile since it can still harm people even while it’s regenerating in this form and traps him with it so he has no choice. Zapp’s pretty sure he can’t do it but he finds his motivation when Chain tells him that the counter girl he was trying to hit on earlier wants to bang him and he destroys the ZTF faster than he can get a boner (oh Zapp, you scumbag, you). As expected, Chain was just tricking him, but Zapp’s woes aren’t quite over yet as another one of Raju’s apprentices is coming to town though the conclusion to that is being saved for next week.
Now as for the Black/White side of things, we first get confirmation of what the final shot of the previous episode implied: Black and White were at some point human, and those are just aliases of some kind as their real names are William and Mary (yeeeeeeepppp…you’re never gonna get me to actually call them that). Black tells Leo how when the collapse that created Hellsalem’s Lot happened, it affected the Alterworld too and both sides sent out beings known as Casters to make a barrier that would stop it. They succeeded but there’s still a lot of mysteries concerning the hole that was created in the aftermath and the Casters are still around trying to learn the answer to this day. He also reveals to Leo that he and White are in fact Casters themselves and this comes into play in a pretty big way later.
Later on Black asks White how she actually met Leo the first time since he’s positive it wasn’t really at the hospital. White tells him he’s mistaken but the memory jumble he has when thinking back to how Leo claimed the first time he saw Black was at the subway, it gives the distinct impression the three of them had met much earlier than that. It also turns out that White isn’t really an ill girl after all as her physical ailments are long gone so she’s hanging out around there for a different reason but that’s not the biggest revelation of all.
The real doozy here is that last week’s big reveal of Black actually being Blank, one of the 13 Kings was a bit of misdirection.What’s actually going on is that Black’s body has been possessed by Blank and the two are sharing some sort of co-habited existence while Blank prepares to use White for some big plan against Black’s wishes(though Blank claims she’s a willing participant). Exactly how this happened isn’t made completely clear just yet but the implication is Black and White went to the hole in the center of Hellsalem’s Lot with their parents for Caster research and ended up in an accident that killed their parents and forced Black to take Blank inside of his body.
So yeah this episode had a lot of information to keep up with but it’s all really fascinating information so that works to it’s favor. Really curious to learn more about what actually happened to Black and White, and it looks like we’ll be learning more about the rest of the 13 Kings too. Between that and getting to have more fun at Zapp’s expense it’s looking to be good times ahead. Glad this show didn’t veer off the rails for long.
In Summary:
BBB makes up for going a little soft on us last week by giving us the densest episode it possibly can. It offers just as many questions as it does answers but what we do learn offers to make some pretty big changes for what lies ahead. This show is still a utter blast and as much as it threw at the audience this time around, I’m pretty confident it won’t be shy when it comes to handing out the answers later down the line.
Grade: A
Streamed By: Funimation, Hulu
