Berserk

Episode 6

Oh, Shin Itagaki. He tries so very, very hard. At this point in Berserk, I would give his efforts to spice this ugly production up about a 5:1 success ratio. For every five times his weird, surrealist, sweeping shots make the show more engaging, there's one that completely takes you out of it. This week, the five-ish welcome innovations come from Guts's hauntingly uncomfortable conversation with the Skull Knight, and the one booby prize goes to a scene where the camera cranes and swoops around Luca giving her fellow whore a very dramatic spanking. You win some, you lose some, but in spite of all its other problems, at least this adaptation has never been boring.

On that note, there seems to be some confusion over the disparity between my low ratings for these episodes and how earnestly I talk about their content, as if I'm really into the show despite those "meh" letters. To clarify, I'm going to spend the majority of these writeups talking about the story, and even though it's no Golden Age Arc (yet), and even though the circumstances can seem too gratuitous even for the dark themes they explore, I'm still both entertained and impressed by Miura's writing and strong visual concepts across these six episodes. For the most part, it's all I want to talk about. We all know how bad the show's production looks and how hard the direction tries in spite of that, sometimes making things better, sometimes making them worse, so I just assume this as a given going into every new episode. So if I wax rhapsodic about the story's twists and turns and then stamp a "C" on the end of the episode review, that's just because Berserk's horrible production work really does undercut my enjoyment of a good story that much, even if I didn't talk about every time. I'd been getting the impression that the readers don't want to hear about it anymore either. You can just append this sentence to every review going forward: "This episode looks like absolute butt. But what happens in it?"

In this case, we learned a lot more about Nina, the gentle blonde girl working as a prostitute alongside Luca in the slums along the Kushan border. The show hasn't been super-clear on her circumstances yet, but she seems to have contracted one of the countless diseases that can spell the death of a sex worker in this unsanitary environment, causing her to lose all hope for salvation and throw her lot in with the region's most hedonistic heretics. She's miserable, but she can't see any other way out of her predicament, so she tries to at least take a companion down with her. One of her past customers, a sensitive boy named Joachim, doesn't have the resources to marry her and seems to have barely enough money to pay for her services at all, but he obviously cares about Nina, so she decides to drag him to hell with her that night. Casca and Luca follow along out of curiosity and concern, and that's when things get really messy.

So if you've given up on the church completely, how do you throw your lot in with the heretics? Well, you hike down a steep crag into a dangerous canyon, strip off all your clothes, get high as balls in the hallucinogen-hotboxed human stench pit, orgy yourself into a stupor, and cap off the whole wild night by eating a stew made from chunky human remains! When Joachim can't quite make it through that final step and makes a break for it, Nina and the other heretics are forced to hurl him off a cliff to keep their rituals secret from the giant hellish inquisition going on just a few miles away. As her boyfriend disappears into the darkness, Nina breaks down in tears, finding herself alone no matter which path she chooses. By the end of the episode, it's clear that Nina's story is less about her personally and more about the common downtrodden soul reflected in so much of Berserk's overall cast. Many people are consumed by an evil fate because they're left with no other choice, bringing to mind the prologue narration from the original TV show: "Man has no control, even over his own will."

We see this reflected in several other characters across this episode alone. For instance, there's Serpico, a crafty and considerate young man who obviously doesn't believe in the Holy Knights' or Mozgus's methods. After he steps in to save the young son of a heretic from being burned alongside his father, he reveals that his own past wasn't so different. His mother was burned alive on a pyre before his very eyes, and it's strongly suggested that this horrifying event is where he met Farnese—who was enthusiastically chucking torches onto the pyres as the crowd approved the bold piety of such a young girl. Did she do this out of fear of being burned herself? Was she abused and lashing out at an unfair world? Or does she simply "want to see the world burn" and covers this demented desire up by coating it in false layers of self-righteousness? As Farnese trembles in bed from the memory, maybe it's some torturous combination of all three. In any case, it's easy to see how these two would end up serving the Holy See out of the wicked circumstances of their past rather than their own convictions, even if they might tell you they chose this path themselves.

The same could be said of Mozgus's disciples, who don't seem to enjoy their haunting work quite like their sadistic master. Most of them are horribly deformed, doomed to a short life of pain and rejection without the salvation Mozgus's employ gives them. The only normal-looking one of the lot (and perhaps the only one mentally sound enough to speak for the group) is an albino man with a severe sun allergy, who was living in the hollow of a tree trying desperately not to burn to death in the everyday sunlight when Mozgus gave him the freedom of a protective bodysuit in exchange for life as a disciple in charge of torturing people. He finds his job upsetting, but he manages to rationalize away the horror through his belief that he's serving God in some way, instead of dying a lonely death accused of being some kind of vampire by so-called "normal" people.

Then there's Casca, who's only able to survive by the twisted grace of the same forces who traumatized her in the first place. When she wanders into the gathering of heretics, their effort to drag her into their hellish orgy spells their doom. As they uncover her brand and she flashes back to the eclipse, demons rise from the earth and zombify her attackers, causing the few survivors to fall to the ground and worship her as some kind of witch. Unlike Guts who must fight to defend himself every night, it seems like Casca is protected from demon consumption by her mark as Griffith's "bride," not to mention the lingering specter of her abandoned demon child. I'm not sure if that ugly-ass baby is alive or dead at this point, but it does seem especially cruel that its existence is the only thing keeping her alive.

As the frothing horde begins to praise Casca at the top of their lungs, Guts had better get his rear in gear! The nightmare he saw of her being burned as a heretic is coming closer and closer to fruition, and it seems like another Apostle may be on the rise when Joachim's body turns up significantly less dead than we had previously assumed. Berserk is all kinds of messed-up and disgusting, but the horror continues to be far more than skin-deep, and I'm eager to see what will happen when all these tragic forces finally clash. What was that about another Eclipse on the horizon? Wasn't one bad enough?!

Rating: C+

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.