Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond

Episode 3

This episode review is dedicated to the memory of Zapp's dick. Rest in peace, you turgid warrior.

Now that I think about it, we haven't gotten that many episodes about what Libra members get up to off-duty. The ones that we have (the hamburger episode, the lunch rush episode) have focused on Leo and to a lesser extent Zapp, so we really have no idea what anyone else does on the special days when they haven't been tasked with saving the world. This week treats us to a rare glimpse of daily life for two of the first season's least-explored characters: Stephen and Chain. Coincidentally, these are also the Libra members I most wanted to see more of in this second season.

The Chain plot actually starts out Leo-focused, so I'll begin with that one. So Leo's walking down the street when he runs into a hulking gangster-like dude, who proceeds to accost our hero and deprive him of his wallet. Unusually for this sort of thing (which I'm sure happens to Leo like five times a week), the mugger is a tourist who seems unimpressed with what he's seen of Hellsalem's Lot. While he's being mugged, Leo also happens to make eye contact with Chain, who's travelling overhead. However, she ignores his plea for help. Bummer.

After this incident, Leo decides to take matters into his own hands in order to protect himself in Hellsalem's Lot. First thing's first, he's going to get back his wallet, which contains money that he was going to send home to Michaela. So he goes to Libra's armory, picks up a nonlethal stun baton, and sets out to enact some street justice. This goes about as well as you'd expect – Leo can't take it upon himself to even try and hurt the guy, on the off chance that just a tasering would end up killing him somehow. He also refuses to use his God Eyes in this situation, since he feels that it wouldn't be right to use them for his own personal benefit. So he ends up face down on the pavement again. But when his assailant returns to his seat at the bar, who does he find there but Chain Sumeragi. Enticed by her feminine charms, the tourist agrees to a drinking contest and proceeds to get hustled out of everything. Chain also leaves him with the bill, and lacking the means to pay normally, he ends up having to sell his body – literally. The next we see of this fella and his friend, they're heads in jars hopping around on the sidewalk. It's a bit harsh, but that's what you get for underestimating Hellsalem's Lot.

This story is a good summation of both Leo's character and Chain's. Leo tries to take on a combat role for once only to find himself totally unsuited for the job. He's just not the type of person who can take it upon himself to actively hurt others, even when it's defensively motivated. (That's why we like him, of course, but I'm sure it must be inconvenient in situations like these.) Chain, meanwhile, puts on a front of callousness while actually being quite protective of people behind the scenes. They never clarify why Chain ditched Leo while he was being mugged – I choose to believe that she thought he could handle himself – but she kept an eye on him and came back with a vengeance when he was hurt a second time – at a fair personal cost, as we see in the post-credits scene. The ordeal left her with a monster hangover that she probably wouldn't have gotten into otherwise. I look forward to learning more about Chain in the next episode, which will be focusing on her much more.

The episode's second storyline is about Stephen throwing a party. His character is really an enigma at this point, so this is our chance to discover the nuances to his role as Klaus's right hand man – and does it ever deliver. The buildup is pretty gradual at first. Stephen interacts with his housekeeper, a Beyondian woman named Veded, then does all the usual things that rich people do to prepare for gatherings with their ritzy friends. The guests show up, the party starts, and Stephen appears to be having a good time hosting. But when he turns his back, his guests all bust out crazy arm guns to take their host in dead or alive (but preferably alive). So Stephen's fancy friends had all been bought by some alien menace to take him in and use his capture to destroy Libra. That sucks. Of course, Stephen has suspected this for a while, so he only went through with the party to confirm his concerns before rounding up his enemies in one go. He dispatches them easily and leaves the rest to his private squad of violent goons, which he apparently has.

So yeah, Stephen has a side gig. Libra doesn't known about these guys, and according to Stephen, he hired them to do dirty work that Klaus won't tolerate on his watch. This little indiscretion tells us quite a bit about Stephen. We already know that Nightow tends to reuse archetypes in his work, and Klaus in particular slots into Vash's archetype as a Christ figure committed to nigh-impossible ideals for the sake of protecting the common man. However, Vash was only able to survive this way of life because he had a buddy, someone who shared his ideals but found them unsustainable in his own quest for justice. That was Nicholas D. Wolfwood, and it looks like our own Mr. Starphase has taken that preacher's mantle as his Jesus's antiheroic shadow. I'm curious to see where this plot might go in this anime adaptation. I have read the manga, and this detail hasn't seen much follow-through yet. (To be fair, the English release is pretty far behind. Get back on this, Dark Horse!) Hopefully this trait will get tied into whatever overarching story has been written for this season.

At the end of the night, Stephen is left moping on the side of the road, coping with the knowledge that he has no real friends outside Libra. Fortunately, his housekeeper happens to be passing by and stops to pay him a visit with her kids. With this, Stephen is reassured in knowing that some people (who aren't also his coworkers) do actually care about him and aren't just trying to infiltrate his life in an attempt to murder him. And then Zapp's dick exploded.

Yeah, there was a Zapp plot alongside all that other stuff. It revolved – naturally enough – around his wiener. So Zapp's been hooking up with a lady (of the evening) who turns out to be a witch. One day, he was crashing in her room getting high with another sex worker when she busts in yelling about her cat. Zapp is too stoned to pay attention, so she casts a spell that'll knock the skin off his member if he doesn't find her cat. That's kinda harsh, but then again Zapp was lazing around her room with another woman, so whatever. (RIP that other girl's boobs though.) This snaps Zapp to attention, setting him out on a manic quest for pussy – and not in the usual way.

This was 100% a comedy subplot and it was excellent. I love some good obscenity, in the vein of shows like Osomatsu-san. To be honest, the best joke in this segment wasn't even penis-related, but rather a brick-stupid gag about Zapp getting mauled by an alien creature because its name happens to sound almost exactly like the word “cat.” You can hardly blame him for this, because seriously, what kind of person uses feline terminology to refer to something completely unrelated? Oh well, back to the pussy hunt. In the end, Zapp doesn't find the cat in time (the kitty and the hopping heads harassing Leo got picked up by Veded's kids as new pets), so I must assume that he is now extremely circumcised.

Of Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond's first three episodes, I'd call this one the strongest by a fair margin. That Matsumoto Spice™ is still missed, but it doesn't matter as much when the material is this strong. It helps that the new director, Shigehito Takayanagi, is doing a fair job of compensating for her absence. The results aren't nearly as raucous, but he does a good job replicating a lot of the first season's distinct cinematographic tics. For example, that shot of Zapp in the bedroom, where the three mirrors show us what's happening in reverse shot within the frame, totally feels like something Matsumoto would have come up with. What I'm saying is that if this level of quality is maintained, Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond could represent only a minor decrease in cinematic quality relative to the first season.

The real test will be in whatever overarching storyline they manage to come up with for this season. There's still not much indication of what that will be, although they're continuing to emphasize how Leo obtained his God Eyes, along with his relationship with his sister. However, in the event that this season mostly ends up being a couple of well-executed manga chapter adaptations, it'll still have been worthwhile for me, since that basic material is still so damn good. Blood Blockade Battlefront understands something fundamental about life: if the world is always ending, what reason is there to ever stop partying?

Grade: A

Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.