Blood Blockade Battlefront

Episode 4

Four episodes in, we've finally gotten to the real meat of Blood Blockade Battlefront's story. The more leisurely (kind of) vignettes leading up to this point were exhilarating enough, but now that we've seen the show's core conflict exposed, it's almost too much excitement to handle!

No, really. There's officially too much to handle this time. We have gone in too hard and too fast. This feels like ten episodes of content in a one-episode bag. You know what, I'm just going to break down the blow-by-blow of episode 4 as simply as I possibly can and see if it doesn't result in the longest-episode-review-ever-written-that-still-can't-possibly-cover-everything.

First off, a stranger on the subway gives Leonardo a helpful census breakdown of Hellsalem's Lot. 50% of its population are inhuman creatures, 20% are unidentified anathema, and 25% are human, but half of that number are in some way mutated, superpowered, or enhanced to survive here. The final 5% of the population are beings that cannot be detected by human or monster eyes...but perhaps the eyes of a god. At this suggestion, Leonardo sees a person flanked by glowing wings of blood, and thinks he must have found this one being in twenty.

He mistakenly decides to brag about this at Libra's next big office party, which begins introducing us to the sheer size of the organization and several other key members of the cast before the party halts with a record scratch at Leo's boast, and the plot takes a mercenary U-turn. Leonardo has seen a Blood Breed (or vampire, except they are all turned humans, not natural-born) and this is apparently really bad. Libra must call in a specialist, the unintentionally deadly Blitz T. Abrams, foremost leader in vampire knowledge. He's unintentionally deadly because "Lucky Abrams" has been cursed by vampires so many times in an effort to get rid of him that the curses keep canceling each other out, causing horrible devastation to everything and everyone that isn't him. (Yashiro Nightow wrote this? You don't say!) However, unlike Vash's curse, Abrams' is played purely for comedy, resulting in some downright inspired gags. I laughed pretty hard at all of Abrams' near-miss deaths in this episode, and BBB's blend of lively animation and perfect comic timing continues to shine.

This leads us into U-turn #2, as Abrams' unlucky luckiness is the sole nugget of comedy in this otherwise grim shift in tone for the series. Before agreeing to help with Klaus' Blood Breed investigation, Abrams wants to use Leo's God-Eyes to help solve his own investigation subject: The Elder 13. The Elder 13 are the creators of Blood Breeds, eldritch beings so powerful they've only interacted with Hellsalem's Lot once, resulting in the deaths of 343 people who were crushed together in the form of a giant crucifix as a warning. (Yasuhiro Nightow wrote this? You don't say!) After a fierce battle, Abrams' team managed to retrieve one Elder being's hand, with a scrap of unreadable paper clamped irremovably between its fingers. Abrams thinks that it contains a clue to the true names of these Elders, and if humanity has their true names, they will have power over these almighty forces and can stop them from creating more vampires. Despite all evidence suggesting that this is a terrible idea just leave the elder vampires alone, Leo agrees to read the paper, which does give him a heap of information, but also fries his god-eyes and puts him in a mild trance. Abrams decides this means Leo's eyes are now attuned to a higher plane, so he decides to move on to step two of the investigation and drag Leo to Yggdrashiad Central Station, which is literally just a train stop inside the legendary tree of life between NYC and a Beyondian locale called "Near-Nothingness." Clearly, Abrams' myopic endangerment of others is metaphorical as well as literal, as he jovially moves from breakthrough to breakthrough using Leo's powers without showing the tiniest bit of concern for his safety. Still, Klaus lets him do what he wants both because Abrams was his old mentor, and he really needs his help on the Blood Breed investigation. Leo seems to have no say in the matter, but on the other hand, he never volunteers any objections, so that's on him.

Okay. All of that happens in the first half of the episode. Madre de Dios.

Once they get to Yggdrashiad Station, Abrams drags Leo to the bottom of the tree and tells him to gaze into the abyss of Near-Nothingness, where the Elder 13 live. ("If you see anything abnormal, shut your eyes. No, hang in there until the last second, then shut your eyes. No, wait until you feel like 'There's no hope left! I'm going to die! I'm done for, I'm done for, stop, stop, stop!' then shut your eyes." Abrams is a huge jerk, but it's hard to dislike him when he has so many great jokes.) Leo does so without complaint, and the results are as positive as you might have predicted. He collapses, blood pours from his eyes, and gives a terrifying report: "It's bad. There's not just thirteen. They're everywhere. There are hundreds of Elders down there. How in the world have we been safe up until now?"

Ask a scary question, get a scary answer; Klaus immediately gets a call reporting that one Elder and one Blood Breed have appeared to attack innocents in the subway back home. "While the cat's away," I guess. The only agents in the area equipped to hold them off are K.K. and Steven Starphase, so a bloody battle begins while Klaus, Zapp, Abrams, and Leo rush back as fast as they possibly can. K.K. and S.S. aren't doing so well, but it's hard to fight what you can't see, and the vampires even become visible at points just to mess with them, or take shots to the head to prove that it won't kill them. Like everything else in this episode, it's blink-and-you-miss-it, but the Elder of the pair drops a tantalizing hint to the origin of Libra's powers. "You seem designed to be our natural enemy," she says, "You fight with your blood, which chemically breaks down our own." However, the process is far too slow. As soon as Libra blood starts breaking down vampire cells, they begin to regenerate. To defeat a vampire, agents would have to hack away at it again and again until there was nothing left, before inevitably being killed in battle themselves. It's pointless. Steven Starphase disagrees. "It may take 1,000 years or 1,500 years, but if we don't stop fighting, the paradox will turn in our favor someday. It's all one grand play for time, but the day will come when immortals can be killed. Then what will you do?" Right after he says this, Klaus blazes into the subway and confronts the Elder with her own True Name. Stunned, she freezes up, and Klaus' blood, with the power of her name, binds her into some cross-shaped artifact...not dead, but defeated. We don't know what happens to her lesser Blood Breed partner yet. Shocker, they couldn't pack that into this episode too.*

I loved this scene, because it's yet another literal reinforcement of metaphorical ideas at play in the story, and they're ideas established by the "standalone" previous episode too. Libra's agents seem birthed from a similar source to the Blood Breeds, which are an effort by Elder Beings to make humanity destroy itself. In a world of monsters and humans somewhere between good and evil, these vampires are meant to be Evil in its purest form, and Libra's inverse power of Good has to work full-time to stop Evil's spread, much less actually defeat it, because fighting for the side of Good comes with moral accountability, a handicap that puts the lives of others before your own. It's a simple but effective dynamic that sits at the heart of many superhero stories, but lacing it right into the biology of the two forces makes for a special touch. Righteousness belongs to the righteous fight, not to the victory. As Leo puts it, "Getting your ass kicked and giving up are two very different things."

Speaking of Leo, this episode ends with yet more reveals about his lady-crush, White. Her brother is a Blood Breed, the mysterious figure who spoke to Leo on the train at the beginning of the episode, and he also appears to be Femt the Lord of Depravity's boss or at least a close friend calling in a favor for the next episode. Leo is still very much in love, still checks in on White regularly, and has no idea about any of this. Oh what a tangled web! White's brother also seems to be fond of the Magic Flute Overture for some reason. Maybe the vampires have a freemason-esque system going on? I have no idea yet.

I briefly considered knocking this episode down from A+ to A, because it did seem like an entire movie's worth of content squashed into twenty minutes, and could easily have been decompressed for a more lucid experience. At the same time, I wasn't confused while watching the episode; I was enthralled, and all the details became more concrete on an attentive rewatch. How can I punish a show that so routinely demands my attention? (This show really needs an English dub.) By the heart-stopping climax, I didn't care if I had all the details straight or not. Clearly, the episode just wants you to rewatch it and think about everything you're seeing, whether that's the show's worldbuilding or subtextual themes, or just dumb jokes hiding in the corners of scenes like Sonic Monkey getting progressively drunker and drunker over the course of Libra's office party. There aren't many episodes of anime I can recommend with a double or triple rewatch value. Blood Blockade Battlefront now has four of them in a row. Amazing.

* EDIT: apparently, the lesser of the pair is killed right before his mistress is killed, in literally a one-second-or-less shot that also heralds Klaus' arrival. He didn't see it coming and neither did we!

Rating: A+

Blood Blockade Battlefront is currently streaming on Funimation.

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