Well, let’s give credit where it’s due – that was massively better than the first episode. Admittedly that’s a low bar, but I give that one a little slack because it was the first new ep in more than five years. It made totally the wrong choice in how to approach that, but no choice would have made it an easy task. The premiere was a total snooze but this was a huge improvement. Stuff actually happened, it made sense, and it really felt like we were back in One Punch Man again.
That’s in spite of One Punch being a very minor presence in the episode. But you know that’s basically okay, because most of the time he’s a pretty boring character to be honest. When he fights Saitama is basically infallible, and that constitutes literally one punch, There are moments when Saitama’s downtime antics gain a certain profundity as a commentary on the ennui of young adults in modern Japan. But mostly it’s just the kedaruge gag played over and over in slightly differing forms.
My feeling with the mixed bag of Season 2 was that Garou was the most interesting person on-screen, and nothing I’ve seen makes me think S3 will be any different. He’s a thoughtful guy, for starters. He’s fucked-up but he has a certain self-awareness about it. He’s strong, but not so much that his fights are boring. And his conflict plays as pretty genuine. He’s just not evil, sorry – when he acts on impulse as with the hero otaku kid he keeps rescuing, he defaults to doing to right thing. His misguided obsessions first with hunting heroes and then “becoming” a monster are dead ends of course, but it’s not uninteresting watching the obviousness of that slowly dawn on him.
The world is a mess, and my gut feeling is that Garou will eventually be one of the ones fighting to save it. Extremist groups are on the streets arguing for human sacrifices to placate the monsters, and anarchy seems to generally be reigning. Garou stops to help a couple of people about to fall victim in various ways (because helping people is what he does, mostly) and then heads to the family restaurant for a steak. And then about 20 steaks, and salads. Saitama shows up on the same place on the way back from picking up the napa cabbage, only to realize he’s dropped his wallet. Blizzard shows up to nag him again, so he cleverly orders some fries to “share” and sticks her with the check. And then Garou doing a dine-and-dash (I never said he was a saint) gives Saitama an excuse to bug out himself.
This sequence is pretty funny, as it the bit when One Punch catches up to Garou and Tareo (the kid). This of course is the guy worth actually rousing himself from his laxity to kick his ass, but he has no idea and just wants to go home. He introduces himself as “Caped Baldy” and realizes One Punch isn’t even in the hero almanac. He does kick Garou’s ass but has no idea whose it was, then takes off. When Garou comes around, a couple of monsters have come to confront him over his random acts of kindness. One of them, “King the Ripper“, is a notorious child killer and sets his sets on Tareo. Naturally, Garou intervenes to stop that from happening.
It seems pretty obvious – even to him, now – that Garou and the Monster Association are a bad fit. We’ll see where his journey takes him, though. Meanwhile Zombieman (who I barely remember, though it’s nice to hear Sakurai Takahiro) is on the hunt for the House of Evolution (which I don’t remember at all, if it was in the anime already), which he believes to be the one pulling the M.A.’s strings. Zombieman tracks them down to a takoyaki stand manned by a gorilla – a gorilla who promptly informs him that the House of Evolution has already been taken out and invites him in for takoyaki. It’s one of those random WTF moments that One Punch Man is rather good at, and this ep in general had a lot of what it’s good at. Dare I be encouraged?
