Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War

Episode 3

While the first two episodes of TYBW did a solid job getting us into the in-the-moment action of this new arc, they were also pretty stingy on firm details. We know that this conflict involves the longstanding grudge between Quincy and Soul Reapers, but it's been a looooooooong time since that bit of history was relevant, and hammering out the exact reasons behind both groups' animosity is probably a good move. That means episode three slows down considerably for most of its runtime, delivering a lot of necessary, but not always graceful exposition.

Let's start off with the stuff that doesn't work all that well. First is Opie's initial face off with Ichigo, which mostly serves to explain how our new enemies' powers are different from the techniques we've seen Uryu use before. And by that I mean Opie quite literally explains the difference to Ichigo, in the middle of their fight, seemingly for the audience's sake, because I have no clue why he would want or need to tell his opponent any of this. On the plus side, Opie's Voll Stern Dich form is suitably impressive, both in its initial shape and especially when he absorbs Ayon and starts hulking out. On the negative side, it's hard to ignore that this is once again just a reskin of the Shika/Bankai setup established with Soul Reaper powers. Bleach just can't say “no” to the dramatic flair of giving each new enemy a second form, and at this point it just feels overused to me. I was far more impressed with the way Opie used the already established Quincy power of gathering Reishi to straight up destroy his opponents and the surrounding landscape, re-contextualizing a familiar power that's now being employed against our heroes. Unfortunately the fight is so busy explaining things that it doesn't flow very well or even get a conclusion this episode, and that drains a lot of the tension the sequence should carry.

Still, sometimes when you're writing a conflict of this scale, you just have to bite the bullet and dump some exposition so everything after that can hopefully run smoothly. Thus, we also get a sudden and perfunctory lesson about the necessity of a balance of spirits between the Soul Society and the living world from a character we have never met before, explaining it all to Ryunosuke and Shiki. That balance – and the new Quincy group's plan to upset it – mostly serves to up the stakes for what's to come, beyond the established issue of Quincy destroying Hollow souls rather than returning them to the cycle of reincarnation. Which, personally, I'm not really a fan of. Yes, it establishes serious external stakes outside of Soul Society, but that only serves to simplify what could have been a much more complex quarrel about punishment, absolution, and a myriad other topics that Bleach's vision of the afterlife has always hinted at but rarely confronted. The Quincy were an entire race of people with their own philosophy, and are now seeking revenge for the genocide of their people, but this new emphasis on spiritual balance means they are also seeking the annihilation of the entire universe, which flattens the whole conflict.

It's even stranger when a parallel conversation doubles down on how Soul Society aren't unalloyed good guys, as we get another reminder – courtesy of Mayuri, of course – that they are less than scrupulous in their mission to preserve order. Yamamoto gives his resident mad scientist a stern talking to for killing 28,000 resident spirits to correct the imbalance the Quincy have caused, but makes it clear he was fine with the plan – he just wanted the proper paperwork filed before doing it. We've known since their introduction that Gotei 13 were more about order than justice, considering how determined they were to execute Rukia back in the day, not to mention how they've kept a ruthless sadist who experimented on live human subjects (and bragged about it to one subject's grandson) on their payroll. And that has not changed just because more malicious threats like Aizen have since appeared. That's a good thing from a narrative perspective – it gives this conflict more texture than simply having our established good guys fighting a new wave of villains, and I hope that's the angle this oncoming war plays with rather than the world-ending stuff.

I also appreciate that while he's not present on either battlefront, we still get some time with Uryu, even if his scenes mostly amount to finding out the same information everyone else learned in the thick of things. Uryu is already positioned as a perfect character to explore the emotional conflicts of a war between Quincy and Soul Society, and fleshing out how he feels about either side, and who he ultimately wants to fight for, is almost certainly going to be key to this whole arc. So I'm glad that even if he's not immediately important to the story at hand, he's not being forgotten off-screen. Ichigo may be the hero of this series, and thus will get the biggest fights, but keeping Uryu relevant and in our minds is pivotal for making this whole war mean something.

On the topic of that war, it looks like we're jumping right into it next episode. King Quincy realizes that whenever the main character of the story is busy with something else, that's the right time to strike before they can show up to stop you, so he says to hell with that five days stuff. And once again the sheer presentation of the initial invasion makes it work, showing off a whole mess of new enemies as they immediately wreck shop. It speaks to both the strength of the character designs and the exuberance of the direction that I can get hyped over a montage of people I've never seen before, but that's kind of the magic that sustained Bleach through even its dullest doldrums, and it's a great way to wake the audience back up after a slower, talkier installment this week. I still have my qualms about some of the creative decisions surrounding these oncoming fights, but by god am I excited to see them start throwing down.

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Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is currently streaming on Hulu.