Ippo works to evolve the Dempsey Roll while Sawamura calculates his next kill.
What they Say:
Episode 8 – The Mad Dog and the Red Wolf
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers).
With the thought of his upcoming match with Sawamura nipping at his heels, Ippo puts his all into strengthening his tried-and-true signature move, the Dempsey Roll. Unfortunately, the Dempsey Roll’s weaknesses are well-known, and Sawamura himself has made it his personal mission to target it in order to hurt Ippo where it will sting the most. The Dempsey Roll’s steady motion works like a metronome, and any boxer with a keen enough sense of rhythm could use some well-timed counters to put a stop to its power. Ippo begins to train harder, not with thoughts of inventing a new knockout blow to add to his arsenal, but with an eye towards evolving the Dempsey Roll into something that can resist Sawamura’s deadly arm. Aoki, Kimura and Itagaki are enlisted to help out, and it’s some surprising input from Aoki’s new lackeys that inspires Itagaki to come up with a possible solution.
Sawamura, in the mean time, doesn’t so much train in the traditional sense as he begins to lust for the fresh “meat” that accompanies one of his ill-gotten victories. His dinner with the high school math teacher who originally turned him on to boxing becomes awkward as Sawamura reveals just how animalistic his treatment of the sport is. A sparring session in preparation for his eventual meeting with Ippo goes sour quickly as he beats his sparring partner without care or remorse.
Finally, as he’s training up his endurance, Ippo receives a huge surprise – an old rival, Alexander Volg Zangief, has returned to Japan to meet with Ippo on his way to the United States. The two reconnect over dinner while Ippo reveals his upcoming plans.
I have to hand it to this series – it really tries hard to humanize its “baddies,” even when it’s pretty obviously impossible to do so. I’ve been watching this season with a few other people, and our primary shared reaction towards Sawamura is that his villainy has been amped up to such a cartoonish level that it’s gone well beyond any sort of believability. Sawamura’s dinner with his former teacher turns into a missed opportunity – what may have been a great moment to ground his character through the use of some seemingly incongruous sentimentality (Sawamura’s desire to reconnect with the man who helped him enter the boxing world), becomes just another moment to feature Sawamura’s creepy sociopathic behavior (and animate a pretty disgusting looking slab of steak). The details of Sawamura’s background as a character would seem to suggest someone who we ought to at least have some sympathy towards, but instead I find myself feeling just a little bit grossed-out. This series seems to waver between a more down-to-earth sensibility towards its storytelling and a tendency towards cartoonish hijinks and over-the-top character personalities, and the pendulum has swung itself just a bit too far in this case.
I was surprised to learn that Ippo’s grand strategy for overcoming the weaknesses of the Dempsey Roll does not, in fact, involve increasing some other set of physical skills, but instead attempting to mold what he can already do, known weaknesses and all, into something that might work against a competitor who claims to be able to see right through it. In my opinion, there’s something kind of unsatisfying about being presented with a storyline that could very well amount to the main character “powering up his super move,” when in many other cases this show has bucked a lot of the trends that tend to plague other sports anime. My expectation is that this part of the story arc will not turn out to be quite as straightforward as it looks to be, and I hope I end up being right.
I’m curious as to how Volg’s re-introduction will play into the next few episodes. It seems almost fanservicey to bring back an old character just for the sake of the few fans who might remember him and enjoy the reference. I’m hoping that there’ll be something more substantial to take away from Volg’s stay with the Makunouchi family.
In Summary:
The events to come could certainly lead to substantial evolution of Ippo’s skills… or it could be an opportunity for some lazy storytelling to show its ugly face. With Ippo poised to develop his primary defining boxing move, the work he puts into it to counteract Sawamura’s overpowering, game-breaking skill could be the deciding factor as to whether or not this season feels as satisfying as those previous. Sawamura’s cartoonish villainy might end up being too much to handle, or it may fall to the wayside as Ippo puts on the fight of his life. It’s up to subsequent episodes to define how these events are perceived.
Episode Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: Acer P235H 1080p LCD Monitor connected via DVI input, Logitech S220 2.1 Speakers, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560