“It’s On! The Special Operation to Bring Down Kaido!”

With the primary big picture focus still on taking down Kaido as expected, the post-recap point gets us into a fight between Dogstorm and Shutenmaru as there’s the dominance game going on to try and win over Shutenmaru. It’s not the most exciting fight simply because I have no investment in either character for their own stories or the big picture. It’s a nicely executed fight but that’s a given in this day and age for One Piece that it’d be well-animated. It’s not bad overall as we get the bigger push to get him to agree but Shutenmaru makes it clear that not everyone will be glad that the Kozuki clan is back. With the twenty-year gap and the events that went down since then, even with the right excuses/legitimate reasons being told, people will be too angry over what did unfold to really accept them back in an honest way at this point.

Once past that, the second half of the episode runs through a lot of different things. Sanji and the others are on their mission to recruit like-minded people who become skeptical as they receive the secret message from the Kozuki Clan. Also It touches on Luffy briefly, hits up a few other players that we’ll be dealing with more going forward, and sets up some connections as well. The push to bring the news of the Kozuki Clan being back is in order as well and that’s drawing a lot of attention and uncertainty. And some that likely thing they can use it to their advantage as well. 

In Summary:
There’s a lot of useful setup here but I’ll be arsed to figure it out if it could taken dozens of episodes to get to it. As much as I enjoy the scope and scale of One Piece it’s also something that is at times its own worst enemy. This episode covers a lot of different things across a number of characters but the next episode could put it all to the side for a few months and focus on just one thing. We’ll wait and see and hope the ride improves soon.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

乂⍱‿●乂