This was probably my favorite episode of Punk Hazard. It was the epitome of the hilarity One Piece offers with how chillingly awesome it can be at the same time. It started with what was one of my favorite gags in the entire series. I often struggle with Franky’s intelligence, at times he comes off as observant and crafty, other times he comes off as the biggest dumbass on the crew. I think when you get down to it he’s incredibly rash, whether it’s pressing Vegapunk’s self destruct button or eating the monster pill early. And seeing it here was so funny I hardly stopped laughing. Franky in Chopper’s body looking so serious and mad and yelling about having a monster “bean” to fight with was already hysterical to me, and then Sanji-Chopper took the “beans” out of his own pocket. Then after being told he won’t be able to control himself and if he must he will only have 3 minutes, he shoves it in his mouth while he instantly and half consciously “BUUUBER’s” in the monster body. A part of me would love a stylish Franky with control of monster Chopper but that dumbass losing control and trying to fight Luffy the entire time as he yelled for him to stop was perfect.
We got to see how Luffy can deal with sharp things now. Back when he was fighting the snake sisters the spiked pit was incredibly dangerous. Now, despite cutting being rubbers biggest weakness, Luffy can harden and deal with it to a degree. I have to wonder if he could harden his entire body and be uncuttable at some point! There was also Luffy using Rayleigh’s teachings to redirect with gum gum balloon! We also amazingly got to see monster Chopper collapse, wake up, try to fight Luffy, and then casually redirect a freaking mountain top at one of the yeti brothers. Pure monster instinct baby! This was all awesome and I began to like the yeti brothers even more due to the prior scene where they thought it was cool that Nami-Franky was a queer and started to be giant adorable nerds about what was “cool” and “not cool”. As scary as they are, they were endearing as all heck there. That duo is a pair of serious weirdos. Their skill to shave and nearly teleport around mountains that they know perfectly and then snipe with guns big enough to encase Franky like he was Haruko in FLCL makes a ton of sense. They are a serious danger.
After the redirects took out one yeti brother, the other King Kong's Nami-Franky and ran off, not willing to fight on his own. But after Luffy fell behind and he reached the top of the cliff we had a chilling Law scene. We saw that he's started to go against Caesar already, cutting up his soldiers, and that continued. He’s such a scary presence as he goes around betraying his former allies without saying anything but the one phrase which means they’re already dead, “room”. He can be quite ruthless when he wants to be, even finishing the brother off with another surgeon-esque defibrillation type technique, counter shock.
This went from hilarious and crazy to just freaking chillingly cool, and then immediately this moment was sandwiched with another one of my favorite gags in the series. As Law is talking to Luffy about his plan, Luffy takes a second to literally bite the chains off of Nami-Franky. Ever since we first saw him biting the cage Buggy put him in with those rubber chompers he’s never given up. The shared shock of Luffy casually biting off the chain while being spoken to had me laugh ridiculously hard. I think it was how underspoken it was that got me.
But after that Law revealed this was in fact the moment they meet in the opening, and that moment? Law asking Luffy to make an allegiance. It’s true, this is the four emperors sea, one must fight them or work under them. Law and Luffy aren’t the types to work under them and we once saw Drake declared war on Kaido so he’s definitely in their camp too. But it goes past that, he has a plan to take down one of the emperors and he needs some help, in fact a key to do so is somewhere on this island. It’s why he came here it seems. This allegiance is great and speaking of opening moments, that goop monster in the opening is totally being sent to take out the G-5. |