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One Piece
Episode 838

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 838 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 3.3

We may have returned to the present at the end of last week's episode, but that may have been a fake-out because the show has more to say about Big Mom's origin and wastes no time crawling back to the past. We got an inkling as to what motivates her as a pirate and why she's so nuts, but that still doesn't explain everything. What we learn this week is that Big Mom's ambiguous-but-not-really devouring of her orphanage had two witnesses: a giant from Elbaph who spreads the story among his people (giving them all the more reason to hate and fear her), and a loner pirate named Streusen who we come to realize is now Big Mom's head chef and the co-founder of the Big Mom pirates. Basically, Streusen assumed parenting duty of this child after her biological parents abandoned her and her adoptive caretaker got eaten. He sees a lot of potential in her immense strength, and his food-creating Cook-Cook powers make them a perfect duo.

This is the point in the exploration of Big Mom's psyche that I think has the potential to be extremely interesting, but making heads or tails of her motivations becomes more muddled. A major scene in this episode is a memory of Mother Carmel teaching her children about equality and racism—though knowing what we know, the sentiment is dubious at best—and Linlin's interpretation of this idea is to create a fantasy world where everybody is equal size. Equality means that everyone becomes more like me! This would explain all the money she would go on to spend on Caesar's gigantism science. Streusen encourages this fantasy, and the two start conquering the world together. Somewhere along the line, she goes from innocent child who doesn't understand her actions to cackling witch demanding that everybody give her all their sweets. I'm not sure the contradiction in her logic is something the show quite manages to suss out in a compelling way, but I like the idea of a villain who conflates her need for instant gratification with world peace.

Sadly, most of this episode consists of a trio of rocket launchers flying through the air in slow motion as Capone and his crew tear it up. This episode is incredibly flat from a pacing and storyboarding point of view, and that build in tension over the rocket launchers just makes the outcome that much more obvious. At the last second, in the midst of her crying and reminiscing, Big Mom's Conquerer's Haki blows up all three rockets in mid-air, and our heroes are completely boned. It also doesn't help that the Haki just feels like a scream on top of a scream, and nothing about Big Mom's physical position has changed in about three episodes. The part of the escape plan that does work cinematically is when Caesar swoops in with one of Brulee's mirrors, but since Big Mom is still screaming, the mirror shatters at the worst possible time and now the Straw Hats and Firetanks are forced to fight. The comedic timing on this moment is fantastic.

In theory, I like the layers upon layers of failure that our heroes are now faced with. It's that exact kind of Shonen Jump carrot-and-stick storytelling that I eat right up, but I think the rocket launchers' misfire can accidentally exhaust the audience instead of excite them. There was no way they were actually going to assassinate Big Mom in this arc, so the stakes don't really hit until the mirror breaks just to kick us while we're down. "How is the crew going to fight their way out of this?" is a more exciting and earnest question than "Are they really going to kill an Emperor?"

There's a lot that's potentially interesting about this episode, but it doesn't do the structure of the story many favors. Jumping in and out of Big Mom's backstory just when we thought we were done with it gets confusing, and the build-up is centered around an event that both doesn't work in hyper shonen slow motion and has a pretty obvious outcome. It's not an especially pretty-looking episode either, so even an important moment like this turns out to be kind of a shrug.

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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