Berserk

Episode 10

Well, this week cements it. Berserk 2016 is getting exponentially better as it reaches its abrupt cancellation date. Nothing like seeing one cour of a golden property rushed through a slipshod production and unceremoniously canned to leave you shaking your fists at the current business climate of the anime industry! But the Skull Knight wasn't kidding when he said Guts was headed for another Eclipse. This week, all hell breaks loose, and while I'd normally say "and it sure ain't pretty," this episode was easily the prettiest this series has ever been in terms of art and animation.

Before everything can erupt in a volcano of crazy, the Skull Knight's got a bone to pick with the little behelit-looking demon that turned Mozgus and his crew into weird angels last week. Unfortunately for Mr. Knight, the demon (let's call him Egghead!) would rather chat with the damsel he rescued, so it snatches Luca up and drags her away to its candlelit cave. (How did he find the time to light all those candles with his spindly little fingers?) Since every time I think Berserk's story can't get any darker, I get proven horribly wrong, the honor of making my jaw drop with shock went to Egghead this week. His human life pre-apostolization was truly gruesome, orphaned so young that he has no memory of any human relationships, surviving off scraps of garbage in a pit beneath a village where they would toss their dead. After a particularly terrible plague (I assume) struck the community above, Egghead was buried alive in a pile of bloated corpses, but there happened to be a little gift nestled amongst the bodies. The Behelit he found gave Egghead a new lease on life as an Apostle. His wish, he explains to Luca, was to be reborn as the vessel for a new and improved world, and this is his promised day. In fact, he only kidnapped her so at least one person would know his sad life story before he hatched into the apocalypse. Well, isn't that...sweet? Seeing as he already used his rebirth powers to turn Mozgus and friends into demi-Apostles, I've got a very bad feeling about what's going to come out of him when he cracks.

This horrifying sequence, along with most of the episode around it, is composed of more hand-drawn elements than we've ever seen from the series so far, which is a marvelous breath of fresh air. Even when the drawings aren't very good or the animation is super-minimal, 2-D renditions of Miura's dark designs will always be more convincing than the too-shiny, flat-textured, 3-D models we've been tolerating for the past ten weeks. The director's penchant for surreal, perspective-shifting montage also works better in 2-D, giving the nightmare of Egghead's unlived life incredibly chilling resonance even with very little animation. (Hey, the original Berserk series created an outstanding sense of atmosphere with very little animation too! It's almost like coming home again.)

That said, I'm still pretty damn confused about what all this foreboding is actually supposed to mean. I don't understand why Egghead turned the inquisitors into demi-apostles yet, and I'm not sure we'll ever get an explanation if this show has to skim through its material at top speed. There are subtle clues: Guts kills four of them in his scramble to save Casca, creating four "fingers" in the impromptu God Hand being made by Ivan Ooze's ascension of the Torture Tower. Is Guts or Casca meant to be the thumb of this new God Hand, sacrifices to reincarnate Femto with all his demonic powers into a pseudo-human body of some kind? I assume that Femto/Griffith is involved because the show keeps hinting that "the hawk is coming," and I can't think of what else a "second Eclipse" could mean apart from freeing the newest member of the God Hand from the hell-dimension to pursue his dream of world domination. (I'm just working off limited information and a selfish desire to see Griffith come back, mind you.) At the same time, what does any of that have to do with Mozgus wanting to burn Casca at the stake, much less the zombification of all the heretics in the surrounding slums? The inquisiton's tower slowly turning into The God Hand is a breathtakingly powerful image, even in low lighting and dumpy CG, but I feel like it would be even more powerful if I had a better idea of why it's actually manifesting.

Regardless, this episode succeeds as spectacle mostly because it doesn't have to rely on any complex characterization, sparing us excessive screentime with those cringey cel-shaded doll bodies flapping their blowholes. We've spent plenty of time learning about all these characters over the past several weeks, so apart from Egghead's soliloquy, this episode is all action from top to bottom. Guts slaughters Mozgus's goons, Skull Knight slugs away at Egghead, Serpico dramatically rescues Farnese from a deadly fall, and a war of fire and madness breaks out between the knights and villagers below. (And on the comedy end of things, Isidoro and Puck futilely smack away at Mozgus, but only manage to damage his holy headgear. I've grown to love those two surprisingly fast! It's interesting to see just how well Miura handles those little drops of levity in his super-dark story.)

For as much as I've tried to predict character arcs in this story (and according to commenters, I've done a pretty okay job so far?), I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen in the plot next week. I do know that this is the first episode of Berserk 2016 I would sincerely call a great time with no reservations. The fact that it will probably be too little too late for most viewers is still the saddest thing about this medieval tragedy.

Rating: B+

Berserk is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jake has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.