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One Piece
Episode 811

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 811 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 3.5

Last week began the fight between Luffy and the forces of Big Mom's army, and this week ends it. Even if he were in better shape, it's hard to imagine Luffy was ever much of a match for an Emperor's crew. I'm still not especially hot on the idea of splitting this fight into several episodes, since it works best as a quick decisive blow, but this half of the battle demonstrates a lot of the enemy crew's cool tricks. The flashiest of these is Charlotte Montd'or's book-themed Devil Fruit, where he transports Luffy into a hallucinogenic dream world while the rest of the crew pummels him.

Luffy's determination to stay put as he waits for Sanji to return continues to be the central anchor of this part of the story, because it makes for a definitive loss when he can't hold his grip and passes out to be taken away with Nami, who also puts up a good fight in this episode. While I'm still getting impatient with the anime's current pacing, I found the consequences for our heroes effective. This is a real defeat.

It's appropriate that we're getting more acquainted with Big Mom's lesser-known children at this point, which might be a benefit of the drawn-out pacing. The likes of Montd'or or Galette are not the hot shots of this family (a casual viewer might even forget their names), but the fact that they all have their own unique powers and relationships is important to giving this family dimension. We're about to spend a lot of time with these faces in the crowd, and I'd put them a step above your usual cronies.

The other important piece of this episode comes from a conversation between Sanji and Big Mom herself, where Sanji agrees to cooperate with the wedding and asks that Big Mom let his friends leave the island safely in return. We've seen this situation before—like when Spandam made a similar promise to Robin, and we all know how well villains keep their promises in this series—but it's cool seeing Big Mom be reasonable and accept the deal. She's very upfront about how Luffy's crimes against her family would be unforgivable in any other situation, and she hovers over Sanji looking more like Yubaba from Spirited Away than ever. This is still the point in the story where we're supposed to wonder who the bigger villain is between Big Mom and Judge, and so far Big Mom seems to at least have a nice side of some variety.

We're getting whiffs of the world-building that Whole Cake Island offers, especially as Luffy and Nami get taken prisoner, but so far it's only whiffs. This is another situation where I found the content at hand to be pretty strong, but it sure doesn't give you a lot to talk about as it tiptoes its way through the middle portion of this arc. There are loads of ideas being presented as the lower rungs of Big Mom's army strut their stuff, but at the end of the day it's still a couple pages of manga material being drawn out. The Straw Hats' defeat is at the very least believable, which isn't always the case during mid-arc low points.

Rating: B

One Piece is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.com.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw

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