“The Capital in an Uproar! Another Assassin Targets Sanji!”

The first half of the episode is what feels like a smorgasbord of material that hits a few different areas. We get Law trying to warn Sanji to lay low because there are some coming from a particular group that are quite dangerous, but that’s just bringing up some new names like Page One for us to wonder if they’re going to be important characters in the arc or just a brief fight along the way to be forgotten about. We’ve had so much of that in the first Wano arc so far where a slew of people were introduced but so far they haven’t merited being remembered. We get to run with different people from within Wano and what they’re doing which shows off some creative things here and there in terms of design, such as King I think it was, as it goes up against Big Mom and her ship making its way upward into Wano. It’s a good sequence visually but just a lot of blah-ness otherwise.

There’s a lot of movement and action here and some decent looking designs, though I can’t say this whole dragon element that’s creeping more and more into the show is working for me. But mostly the episode gives us little in the way of moving forward and rather spends its time adding to the cast and setting up the dangers to come. Which is fine, especially as we get to see what kind of person Sanji is as he, as Sangoro, can’t leave people behind to be hurt when he thinks they’re in trouble.

In Summary:
Sometimes I keep coming back to the feeling that One Piece needs to take a couple of seasons off so that it can have more material to work with and not operate as it does but I know that will never happen for a whole lot of reasons. So, while we do get some really good episodes and stories along the way, we also get things like how the Wano arc is playing out now where it’s just a sprawling cluster of… things happening and it feels distant and disconnected except for the couple of moments where you catch flashes of your favorite characters who might be doing something.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

乂⍱‿●乂