One Piece
Episode 861
by Sam Leach,
How would you rate episode 861 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 3.2
Finally departing from Cacao Island with the wedding cake in tow may seem like a net positive for our heroes, but it doesn't come without consequence. Hanging back on the island is Chiffon's dad, who still has yet to meet her since the day she and Lola were born. This episode is the story of Pound, the father who never got to be.
It hasn't been difficult to grasp what Big Mom's relationships with her husbands has been like. She marries, pops out a few kids to add to her collection, and then tosses the men out like garbage. This is the kind of flashback material that I appreciate from the anime, where two panels of manga now have a chance to actually register and sink in. Pound's a big doofus, but it looks as though he was well-groomed royalty at one point—a sharp contrast to the vagabond we know today—and he seemed to have a genuine desire to be a husband and father in this family where he's clearly unwanted. After he was thrown in a ditch, Chiffon and Lola would grow up to be violently tormented by their mother.
Since Chiffon never actually met Pound herself, she just thinks he's some weird stranger getting involved in their fight. The cake is traveling, but a determined Oven uses his Heat-Heat powers to boil the sea until Pound comes up from behind and smacks him in desperation. The projected story seems pretty clear, where these separated family members will eventually be brought together in the midst of liberating themselves from Big Mom. Hell, we just had an emotional story about reuniting a father and daughter in the arc before this one.
But that's not where Whole Cake Island goes.
They never reunite, Chiffon never learns who her dad is, and Pound is not a match for Oven in a fight. We have a second Pedro situation on our hands here, where there's a pointed heroic sacrifice that's just ambiguous enough not to blow the series' stinginess with character death. Pound seems like a loving man, spending his last moments happy to see that his daughter has found a real family of her own, even offering a belated congratulations on her wedding that falls on deaf ears. Pound contemplates love, happiness, and the changing generational tide, but they're feelings that he gets to experience all by his lonesome, and then he dies.
Pedro and Pound are two deaths that could easily be undone at a later date, perhaps even in the epilogue of the series, but I think it doesn't matter if they're canonically alive or dead, because Whole Cake Island is an arc that begs you to tackle it in isolation. I think if you're at least a little willing to play along and pretend that they're dead, (still a real possibility!) then so much of the arc's artistic expression becomes more clear. In trying to release ourselves from the human bear trap that is Totto Land, we're going to leave pieces of ourselves behind whether we're cognizant of it or not. Personally, I hope we never find out what happened to them for sure. Let the emptiness speak for itself.
Elsewhere, we return to the Sunny crew and their bid to outrun Big Mom and her forces. Honestly, if the show was going to slow down this much, I wish it would allocate some of its time to expanding on scenes like this, because we don't actually get to see the moment where Big Mom leaves Nuts Island (her last known location) and re-discovers the Sunny at sea. It just hard cuts and voila, it's now nighttime and the naval chase is back to square one. Thankfully, it being night means we'll get to see Carrot's upcoming full moon transformation, but that's for next week.
As an episode, this is a notably conservative adaptation. The Luffy vs. Katakuri fight is starting back up, but the animation hit its limits a while back now. The Pound stuff is straightforward enough to get the intended emotions across, but I also think it was ripe to go a lot deeper. That said, I've realized how invested I am in Pound as I've written my feelings out on the subject. He's an insubstantial side character who wormed his way into an already busy cast, but his departure has a visceral poetry to it that I think can easily go unappreciated.
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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