Blood Blockade Battlefront

Episode 6

After five straight episodes of brain-ravaging madness with no breathing room, Blood Blockade Battlefront finally tries on a slow and sappy episode for a change. Does it pull off the tonal shift? The answer just might have you weeping openly into a cheeseburger.

It turns out that Hellsalem's Lot does have a safe haven for humans after all. Beyondians are not permitted to enter the opulent Ghetto Heights (deceptive name), a district demarcated by an enormous art deco wall that covers most of Times Square. It's a posh and exclusive hub for commerce and culture (if you're human), which means just one block away from the police-guarded checkpoint, the streets are alive with aliens either peddling wares exclusive to Ghetto Heights or desperate to buy them. (There are delicious newspapers to be had by the stack from the publishing houses in there!) Humans enter and exit the district with looks of mild disdain for the alien rabble on the outskirts. Even Leonardo is not immune to a little snickering at their desperation. "The isolation and exclusion must spur their appetites even more. Heh. Did I say that out loud?" No sooner does this not-very-nice joke escape his lips than a mushroom-alien named Nej arrives to turn his worldview upside down.

So, this may be the simplest and mushiest episode of the show so far, but it's clearly not meant to be passing fluff. No, this is a message episode, devoid of the wild eccentricity and reference gumbo of past vignettes (save for a pair of key references to Johnny Rocket's and Nightow-favorite penciller John Romita Jr.), because it's too intent on talking about Very Serious Issues. I mentioned in past episode reviews that Nightow's humanism has never been human-centric, and he clearly sees the aliens of Hellsalem's Lot as equally worthy of compassion, empathy, and protection. Since the last few episodes have been about the human element, episode six focuses on the alien side of things. It turns out that Nej the mushroom-alien just wants a hamburger from "Jack & Rocket's," a chain that has now been relegated only to Ghetto Heights, because the establishment doesn't want their food associated with the kind of creatures who might be perfectly happy to wash their meals down with a stack of newspapers. When Leonardo sees a pair of truckers fleecing Nej for four times the price of his promised burger outside the district walls, he decides to become Nej's new supplier. This is met with a surprising amount of derision from even good people like Zapp and White. Leo doesn't get it. Sure, Beyondian citizens are weird, but they're still equal to humans in Hellsalem's Lot. Aren't they?

I'll just cut straight to the point. This episode is about Discrimination, using aliens as a proxy for minorities. Anyone who's watched science fiction of any stripe from almost any era knows that this is an extremely rote premise. That means this episode should be boilerplate at best and eye-rolling at worst. Should. Once again, some wonderful mix of skill and substance comes together to wring great big gobs of emotion out of something we've all seen before. While BBB's fantastic direction has elevated its material in the past, I think the heart-squishing secret is all in the script this time.

Usually, the problem with the "racism toward non-humans" metaphor is that it's taken so far as to become irrelevant to any real-world application. Most of the time, the fantasy analogue for minorities is a half-animal person or mutant, and their existence in the world is met with outlandish "fear of the unknown," while their salvation is caged in their similarity to a "normal" human. This is tired and ineffectual both because it handwaves any kind of bigotry less severe than "vocal hatred," and it couches acceptance of the othered being in some likeness to the majority. This episode of BBB doesn't do that. The lower-class status of Beyondians isn't cruel because they're openly harassed and enslaved, but because they're demeaned and dismissed in smaller ways, even by very good people who want to help them out, like Leonardo himself. They're "funny little creatures" obsessed with human things, and when Nej gets hit by a truck or given half-eaten burgers, it's played for laughs. See, it's okay because he has no bones! He's not really hurt. (The truckers are also quick to point out that they're the ones that were inconvenienced by hitting him, and seem relieved that the police are turning a blind eye.) Besides, he'll scarf up half-eaten burgers as much as whole ones. He says he doesn't mind being overcharged either! Who cares? It's true, Nej does have inhuman qualities that make it easier to dismiss his disadvantaged place in Hellsalem's Lot, but this fact becomes less harmless as the episode wears on.

The more time Leonardo spends with Nej, the more frustrated he becomes with his friends' disinterested attitude toward the Beyondians. When he mentions how unfair it is that Nej isn't allowed to purchase his favorite food, White mockingly asks him if he'd gone to some kind of humanitarian seminar recently. ("No, I just went to a burger joint" is his excellent response.) Like Leo, White isn't some outlandish bigot. Quite the opposite in fact: she's just "tired of the conversation." Just thinking about equality for creatures that might not even have faces to express their feelings to skittish humans seems futile to her. "There are good people in every species, but they're just individuals. It's been twenty centuries since the death of Christ, and within humanity alone, the world is still nowhere near peace. We still can't understand each other. So Beyondians? Not a chance."

It's the portrayal of this conflict as passive and systemic that gives it legs where other minority metaphors in lesser sci fi would fall flat. Discrimination isn't deepened by bad people acting out, (although that's certainly part of it.) It spreads deepest when average people do nothing, believing that things are fine as they are simply because, like Leonardo, they've never known the experience of not being able to buy a hamburger before. Of course, BBB is an action show, so this subtler sadness must eventually give way to more direct violence, when the truckers from the beginning of the episode decide to take out their unrelated frustrations on their former burger buyer. As they pummel Nej over and over, spectators drop comments like "Well, he should have known this would happen if he got too close to 42nd Street" or "Well, they don't really feel pain like humans do, so he'll learn from it". Most damning of all are the number of voices that whisper, "Someone should stop him." Nobody does. These are the kind of details that turn the potentially cartoonish "alien racism" concept into heartbreakingly close-to-home social commentary. Then the episode slams down the sledgehammer as 7th Avenue explodes in a cloud of red spores from Nej's pummeled head.

It's true that Nej has no bones to break like a human might, but the pain he feels is very real. It turns out that Nej has been bumming around Hellsalem's Lot begging for burgers because he's an orphan. His mother abandoned him when she became unable to remember that he was her child, made easier by the fact that Nej couldn't remember her either. They don't sustain any injuries on the outside, but if you stress out a mushroom-alien enough through harm either direct or indirect, they release a cloud of spores to protect themselves by erasing the traumatic experience from their memories (and inadvertently affecting those close by.) Nej has been hurt before, and will be hurt again, even if it's in ways invisible to an uncaring world. Leonardo is shocked by this revelation, but the truckers only see it as another alien facet they can take advantage of. They can hurt Nej all they want, he won't remember it, and they can gather the spores to use for their own criminal purposes. Leonardo is able to save Nej at the expense of his own memories, ends up in the hospital with White once again, and seemingly forgets all the lessons in tolerance and empathy he learned over the past two weeks. Tragic.

Or is it? As I mentioned before, the last few minutes of the episode will really salt your cheeseburger. Systemic discrimination may often be tragically invisible to us, but the little victories are always worth it. Big changes have to start with small ones, and this episode gives Nej and Leo a tiny victory, even if no one else can see it. Oh, and after Hospital Visit #257, Leo has finally crossed paths with White's Blood Breed brother again. His name is "Black," and I'm getting the distinct impression that's not his real name, and neither is "White" his sister's.

We are now halfway through this series, and I'm horribly conflicted about it. On the one hand, there's not enough time in the remaining six episodes to explore BBB's full cast and range of ideas to the extent that I want. On the other hand, I honestly wouldn't change anything about what we've experienced so far because it's been so good. Strictly speaking, the only thing I might change is to slow down the pace of all this great stuff, which only enhances my "not enough need more" problem, rather than solving it. In a show already slathered in both fun and meaning, I always leave new episodes just wanting more. In its own words, Blood Blockade Battlefront is a humanitarian seminar disguised as a hamburger joint, and that's fantastic. Six more episodes will never be enough.

Rating: A

Blood Blockade Battlefront is currently streaming on Funimation.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.