“A State of Emergency! Big Mom Closes in!”

The first half of the episode has Zoro ending up in Ebisu where the once beautiful flower capital is just a shell of its former self. The thing is, everyone is happy and laughing, having fun with his arrival and each other so there’s an uplifting element to it because to be any other way would be to give in and give up. That’s making an impact on Zoro himself so you know he’ll be the staunchest of defenders of this place and will do anything for them should something happen. It’s slow and drawn out, however, so it’s easy to get a bit bored by it. So, when it does switch to Orochi and the women he has performing a banquet for him as the Shogun of Wano, it’s all the excesses that you imagine. The contrast is an easy one to pull off and it’s just as blunt and obvious as what we saw with the villagers.

The second… things become even a bit more scattered about as we get to spend some time with Luffy and his new “friends” in a brief reconnect while also getting to see the mission that Nami is on. The problem isn’t that there are so many storylines going on it’s that we get to forget about some of them for so long that when they come back we’ve forgotten what the point of it all was. And what’s worse is that it bounces about so much with about two minutes to each of the stories that they barely get time to move forward and you end up just getting a quick taste. And, of course, we get the word along the way that Big Mom and her entourage is on the way and are being drawn close thanks to the carp bringing the ship upstream, something that really does surprise the leadership level. Suffice to say, it’s not going to be a happy time when everyone gets together as Big Mom isn’t real popular around these parts.

In Summary:
Just under twenty-minutes of a hodgepodge of material that culminates with Big Mom almost singing. Suffice to say, this episode left me a bit frustrated and mostly bored.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

乂⍱‿●乂