One Piece

Episode 877

Aaaaaaand, STOP.

*clicks stopwatch*

That's all she wrote, my good people! Whole Cake Island officially taps out at 95 episodes, and I reviewed every last one for this darn website! It was no biggie. Hardly broke a sweat.

This isn't One Piece's longest arc (Dressrosa was 118 episodes) nor is "95" really indicative of how big Whole Cake Island is actually supposed to feel. There was a lot more padding than usual since the manga frequently takes breaks nowadays. I'm certainly not in love with the recent pacing—it's ruined a few favorite moments of mine from the manga—but there's only so long I can complain and not get sick of hearing myself. It's been an interesting ride, because Whole Cake Island is near and dear to my heart in a way that no other One Piece arc can claim. I've probably re-read the entire thing from beginning to end at least five times, so doing these anime reviews has been like trying to pick apart and analyze a massive story in slow-motion—made extra difficult by the fact that important contextual details keep rolling in until the very last episode. I decided a while back that I wanted to make this finale review an entire arc retrospective, so I can hopefully take a crack at laying everything out as neat and tidy as possible.

But first, let's tackle what this individual episode has to offer, because it's a lot. Almost every scene this week could warrant its own review:

• Soul Pocus: The Straw Hats are off, finally reaching the edge of Big Mom's territory. One "full circle" detail that I think I've taken for granted is the motif of Totto Land's cotton candy snow, which signifies entering and exiting the area. Most people don't get to leave, so our heroes are witnessing a rare sight. This is accompanied with the arc's final musical number, 'Soul Pocus', where disembodied voices emerge from the sky to lay the arc's themes out in a nice digestible package.

  "With deep reluctance, the ship is pulling away on the tide with the wind."

  This song comes in and out of the whole episode, building to sweeping crescendos and falling to twinkly music box melodies. It's a good song that offers the finale a sense of gravitas that it might not have otherwise, though I occasionally can't tell if the lyrics are comically on-the-nose or if that's just in the translation. I think it's important to keep in mind that, compared to the other numbers, this song is explicitly non-diegetic. In the manga, it's effectively the narrator—and by extension, the author—singing directly to the readers. It's the closest we have to an "objective" reading of the arc's more nebulous ideas, but it still can't help but be playful and macabre as we bask in Big Mom's return to the battlefield, all while Germa 66 and the Sun pirates continue to fight for their lives.

  "I know it's not so easy to be them, but the flowers and trees sing cheerfully."

  The "flowers and trees" are the souls willingly given to Big Mom as payment for living in Totto Land, a facetious suggestion that we'd be better off giving in to the demands of powers beyond our control. Then there's the recurrence of words like "sweetness" and "sugar" in the song, representing our desires for love, happiness, and safety slowly killing us in a Faustian bargain. It's a textbook case of the ole soul diabetes if I ever saw one.

• Schrodinger's Jaguar: Pedro may be gone, but he hasn't been forgotten. His sacrifice was such an intense moment of "Keep moving! Don't look back!" that the Straw Hats hadn't gotten a chance to properly mourn him, and Sanji's only finding out now that the cat-man blew himself up in the first place. Sanji and Pedro both being one-eyed blond chain-smokers who spent half the arc trying to martyr themselves makes me think that some thematic parallels are being drawn here.

  More specifically, this is a scene of solidarity between Sanji and Carrot. Carrot's trying to keep Sanji's spirits high, maintaining her optimistic and bubbly attitude, though it becomes clear that she's the one who needs cheering up the most, so she gets her own little ugly-cry scene in Sanji's arms. The two of them are forced to consolidate the pain of losing a loved one with the knowledge that Pedro ultimately succeeded at what everyone else in this series is trying to do all the time—dying for something he believed in, which is possibly the single most romanticized concept in this entire series. The darker implications of that theme are being observed here, like a hint of fear that we all have that in us or the melancholy of survivor's guilt, but our heroes' conclusion seems to be that self-sacrifice is a gift horse they don't want to look in the mouth.

  "Do you think you could just tell him thank you?" Carrot asks through snot and tears. It reminds me of when Ace died saying "Thank you for loving me." Nobody in this series wants to ask for permission to live or die. Simple gratitude for getting to live at all tends to be enough. Of course, this scene could never be as dramatic as Ace's death, because there's still that asterisk to suggest that Pedro might still be alive, but there are a lot of open-ended plot threads hanging right now and I'm starting to think the mystery is part of the point. Fans want blood! They want to know the stakes are real! It would be an appropriately cruel joke if people finally got what they wanted, and the only barrier to entry was whether they chose to believe it or not.

• One Last Request: The anime had already shown its cards regarding Pudding's final request of Sanji. The manga was a little more coy about it, but nevertheless we find out with certainty that she leaned in for a kiss while they were saying goodbye on Cacao Island. The added twist is that immediately afterward, she used her Memo-Memo powers to erase the kiss from Sanji's memory, so now it only exists as a magical film reel that she keeps to herself. Our lovesick cook finally got some action! Sort of.

  "It was a greedy plot that Mama contrived. The fairy-tale prince. The beautiful princess. They're manipulated in a puppet show. Even sweet nectar that draws us with its flavor has a slyness."

  Charlotte Pudding's perspective comes to the forefront as we witness a replay of the kiss, presented in the form of an old-timey silent film—though even in this memory, the kiss remains out of frame to keep it classy—alongside a chronological retelling of Pudding's experiences with Sanji through flashbacks.

  Pudding was never going to be a hit with everyone, since she folds in and out of clichés at the drop of a hat, but tropes aren't always a product of laziness. Regardless, Oda's done the "beautiful villainess defeated by love" thing on enough occasions now that it's clearly A Thing™ for him, so he's been on thin ice with some readers for a while and there's not much you can do about that. Any earnest attempt I make to meet people halfway on this one gets fiercely sidetracked by the fact that I just love her character so much. She's easily one of my favorites in all of One Piece, and possibly the character that I find the most relatable of them all. This episode does an amazing job boiling her down to her essence, where the pulpy schlock that birthed her character is almost imperceptible through the story's delicate sensitivity.

  "Hidden motives and misunderstandings. A poorly performed play at the risk of your life."

  Some stories just hit you at the right time in life. Pudding's emergence as a romantically-wounded, emotionally-stunted wreck uncannily came when I was nursing my own particularly bad heartbreak. It's possible to live in your own head too much. Pudding and Katakuri are the characters in this arc who develop the most in a traditional sense. They've spent their whole lives putting on performances, trying to be the kind of person they need to be in order to survive, and then they confront the Straw Hats and their shameless honesty and say "Damn, I want that." It's the same reason an anime like FLCL appeals to me; they're stories about accepting the dumb, embarrassing things that you truly want in your heart of hearts.

  This episode is hitting the same beat as Sanji and Pudding's original goodbye from a few episodes ago, which was asking us to sit with the emptiness that comes from an unfulfilled relationship, but bringing it back as a punctuation mark in the final episode turns that emptiness into a plummeting crater. It's hard to imagine where the story even goes from here, now that Big Mom has returned to power and Pudding presumedly has to go back to working for her like nothing's changed. Our final contact with Totto Land is literally just watching Pudding cry her eyes out, and then Big Mom looking into the camera to ask us if we'd prefer to live or die. How do we even begin to emotionally process this?!

• I Saw You Through the Mirror: You'd be forgiven for thinking we were done with Katakuri, but surprise! The most important part of his story is at the end. His wounds are being tended to by Brulee, and with her he finally feels comfortable admitting that the legend about him never laying on his back was a lie, to which he receives a kindhearted, "I know."

  It was easy to wonder why the story had introduced Flampe as the annoying fangirl character when we already had Brulee bragging on his behalf before her. It turns out the answer is "juxtaposition," and the fan metaphor wasn't meant to be solely negative. Katakuri didn't originally adopt his scarf out of insecurity or inadequacy. When he was a kid, he had no problem throwing his ugly face around town and eating all the donuts he wanted. He could beat up anybody who tried to bully him, and he was comfortable in his own skin. It wasn't until the kids he beat up started getting revenge on his family members, which is the origin of Brulee's own scar, that Katakuri saw the consequences of just doing whatever he wanted, and he started covering his mouth and adopted the perfectionist tough guy act to scare off people who'd attack his siblings. Once upon a time, the persona was a selfless act of love, but as the years went by and new siblings were born, it gradually lost its meaning, and his family now felt entitled to the persona. Katakuri wasn't a person to them anymore, he was just a fantasy, and it wasn't until Luffy showed up that he could revert back to being himself.

  Brulee's "I know" line is such a One Piece response. She kept the secret to herself because she loved Katakuri, and she didn't mind playing the part of his hype man. Sometimes a lie reflects a deeper truth, and it turns out Brulee was the real cute little sister this whole time.

I don't think I can gives props to this episode across the board, as much as I'd like to. This is adapting my single favorite chapter in all of One Piece, so I can't help but be picky about the anime's execution. The avant-garde nature of this finale gets across loud and clear, but it's bumping up against enough Toei jankiness to keep it from truly soaring. For every scene that was chest-grippingly perfect, there was another sloppy and poorly-paced one. The music and aesthetic ideas are so far beyond what the show itself is actually capable of.

Something I find endlessly interesting about modern One Piece is how it leans into the artificiality of storytelling. Whole Cake Island is a Disney-musical, and the upcoming Wano arc is framed like a stage play. Whole Cake specifically was a ripe opportunity to go all-in on this concept, since it's so entrenched in themes about personas and egos and the performative aspects of relationships. It's why I'm so eager to find metaphors that could apply to the author himself. Oda is a self-indulgent yet paradoxically crowd-pleasing prankster showman, and I read a lot of mind-twisting existential terror into this arc, as if it's a man's bid to maintain emotional ownership over a work of art that also happens to be among the most commercially exhaustive franchises in the world.

My biggest pet-peeve with the Dressrosa arc was how much it just felt like set-up for later events—its size was so disproportionate to its nature as a transparent stepping stone. In theory, Whole Cake Island should be ten times worse, but it's much more artful and expressive in its lack of closure. I'd almost prefer it if we never heard from some of these subplots again. Why were Big Mom and Lola on completely different pages with their argument? Why was Sanji's mom implied to be the marine hero from the Germa 66 comic book? Did Pound survive? What the hell was up with Judge's eyebrows?! Some of these loose threads will more than likely come back in the main story later, meaning that this series will never end because Oda can introduce long-term character arcs and mystery boxes way faster than he can resolve them, but for now I'm looking at Whole Cake Island in isolation. It feels like such a calculated denial of Wiki-friendly lore, like how some fans are still convinced Big Mom didn't really cannibalize that orphanage because the story dared ask us to read between the lines. The mysteries feel more like corridors of our minds that we choose not to investigate, because we are either incapable or unwilling.

"On our way in there was candy. On our way out was a guillotine. Who won the big fight?"

But let's move away from the more esoteric stuff and grapple with the surface-level aspects of the arc, which I also adore the living hell out of.

One Piece generally has a clear formula. The Straw Hats will show up on an island, make some local friends, learn about the big bad who rules there, hear a really sad flashback, then Luffy will make some bold declaration that reveals the answers to everybody's problems, and the good guy team will split off and get into a series of one-on-one battles with the bad guy team and eventually win. Obviously, Whole Cake Island is an example of the series mixing things up, but even in the most generic examples of this pattern, calling it "formulaic" undersells it, because it's not like anybody else is copying Oda's arcs and doing it better. Nobody can write battles of attrition as well as Oda can, and the entire conceit of the series means we're set up to enjoy this pattern repeated across new locations and characters. Oda has been able to write fresh-feeling Lord of the Rings-sized epics, where the plotting and emotional through-lines are somehow polished within an inch of their lives despite the weekly manga schedule, so they all come together to tell an even bigger story when you take a step back. That's the fantasy of One Piece, the feeling that we're witnessing something more enormous than any other piece of fiction on the planet.

However, my favorite arcs have routinely been what I call the "off" arcs, examples including Skypiea and Thriller Bark, where the focus is less on the big picture world-building and more on aesthetic and structural hooks. They're still huge epics, but there's usually some kind of spin that deviates from the norm—as if to keep the author from getting bored—like the whole crew teaming up to fight a giant zombie, or a fight that consists entirely of Luffy chasing the big bad up a beanstalk while a long flashback plays in the background. Those are the kinds of arcs that get my imagination running the most. They feel like the kind of story an artist wants to tell, as opposed to something an audience wants to see.

Something like Skypiea might work great as a standalone story—it's the best movie Peter Jackson never made—but it's even better as a slightly irritating divergence from the main plot. (Yes, I said that something being "irritating" is good. Shush.) Part of its charm is that you get so invested in where the series is going, big picture-wise, and then you feel that twinge of disappointment when the Straw Hats disappear to an island in the sky, completely separated from the rest of the world. But once you're in that position, the story gets to work extra hard trying to make the detour feel worth it. It's not the characters who develop, it's your relationship with the story that develops. I went into Skypiea hoping it would end quickly, but I came out the other side feeling like a different person. If there's no spontaneity or going in random directions just for the hell of it, then it's not a real adventure.

Skypiea's the best arc, by the way. I will hear no arguments to the contrary.

Whole Cake Island is operating under similar principles. It's the detour upsetting the line between fighting Doflamingo and fighting Kaido. Going in, Luffy's only two goals are to get Sanji back and secure a copy of Big Mom's poneglyph. The plan isn't to engage a one-on-one fight with Big Mom, though the audience might expect that to happen anyway. We go from botching a sprawling espionage scheme, to really botching a mafia assassination plot, to knocking over Big Mom's jenga tower and running for our lives. Every new wrinkle to the story is a detour within a detour, each one committed to the same structural philosophy. Oh, now we have to bake a cake? What? Luffy's going to fight Katakuri again?! The deeper we go, the more we accidentally uncover the dark underbelly of humanity. This is an arc that asks if love itself is nothing more than a dubious ploy, and if happiness is just fleeting entertainment while we wait to die. It asks these things earnestly, and then declares that these feelings of hopelessness and entropy are just as worthy of being called a fun One Piece adventure as anything else.

"Nothing in this world is more dreadful than sweetness."

I adore the Big Mom chase as a story hook. It's a perfect storm of the best spins Oda is likely to throw on top of his usual formula. It has the team-up element that I loved about the Oars fight, but instead of regular combat it's the world's most intense game of keep-away. With the Katakuri fight happening parallel to all this, it also recalls the spirit of Luffy vs. Lucci fighting alongside the Buster Call, except now the Buster Call is a walking cosmic horror addiction metaphor (assuming you think anything about Big Mom is subtle enough to qualify as a metaphor). And it's a naval battle! This is a pirate manga with so few seafaring conflicts, and Whole Cake Island came out swinging.

It's strange that we've spent such a long time in the post-time-skip era without facing any opponents who are way stronger than the Straw Hats. Even Doflamingo felt pretty mid-tier. The "punching up" element is an important part of the series' identity to me. Thankfully, the Big Mom pirates have me covered, even if there are very few traditional one-on-one fights in this arc. If there's a power fantasy for me in One Piece, it's not in pretending I'm in the Straw Hats, it's pretending I'm joe-schmoe opening the morning paper and being amazed by what those upstart rookies have accomplished. Big Mom is such a force to be reckoned with that the big astounding feat our heroes will be known across the world for is the fact that they didn't just die immediately.

I'm tempted to say "this arc isn't without its faults," but I can't fathom what a phrase like that would even mean in a story like this. I'm too far in and the flaws don't matter. One semi-caveat I have for the arc is the initial plot bringing us into Big Mom's domain in the first place, which is the story of Sanji and the Vinsmokes. "Crew member blackmailed into leaving the Straw Hats" is a trope that's long reached its point of diminishing returns for this series. Many people were hoping that this proudly dubbed "Year of Sanji" would mean that our problematic fave cook extraordinaire would outgrow some of his unsavory character traits, but instead the arc is about how great he's always been. Whoops. However, even the aspects of this story that I'm lukewarm on start to acquire new meaning the more I think about them. Sanji's departure from the crew and the urgency to get him back felt disingenuous, and then the reveal that the bomb bracelets were fake this whole time seemed like such a cop-out, but I'm struck with intrigue when I remember that all the Sanji-related conflict in this arc is self-inflicted. Sanji didn't have to choose to cut ties with his dad in person. He's the one who chose to obey the wedding invitation. It's like he allowed an external sense of moral righteousness to cloud his heart's judgement, and it divided him and the crew until Luffy punched the honesty back into him so they could stand as a united family just in time to tear the Charlottes apart with the power of friendship. Even when I try to acknowledge that this arc is imperfect, it comes back around to being weirdly perfect again.

This episode's concluding scene shows the Straw Hats sailing off. Morning has come, the enemies have vanished into the horizon, and Sanji is preparing his first meal since coming back to the crew. This is intercut with a scene bringing us back to East Blue where Zeff, the man Sanji considers his real father, is cooking the same dish to feed a group of rambunctious pirates causing trouble in his restaurant. "Even the bad guys need to eat. We can talk later," is the final line of the arc, showing Sanji and Zeff side-by-side in a split screen, smiling away. The prominence that Whole Cakes Island places on Sanji's kindness (though he probably wouldn't call himself that) was definitely a topic of debate among fans, but I always felt the arc put in considerable effort to suggest that his most "selfless" character traits—his cooking philosophy, his choice to save his family, his chivalry, etc.—have little to nothing to do with other people and everything to do with his commitment to himself and the mentor who gave him his life. Sanji didn't feed Big Mom because he thought good things would come of it, he fed her because he decided a long time ago that's what being Sanji means.

In this story about the nebulous lines between love, fake love, and self-love, there are some things about yourself that can only ever be true to you. Zeff isn't with us in the Grand Line, so he can't opine on whether Sanji is being a good kid or not, but Sanji still aspires to be like him from the other side of the world. The Straw Hats are anarchic spirits, standing precariously between just doing whatever they want and doing good things for other people—whatever keeps them likable while still being roguish and self-centered—but any talk of morality will always draw back to the impact that their role models and parental figures (rarely blood-related parents) had on them. Your values get coded into you at a young age, and whether you've got a good role model or a bad one seems to be a matter of dumb luck. You don't get to choose where love comes from, but when you find it, it's up to you to nurture it and keep on surviving.

Long-form storytelling offers a chance to reflect a side of life that's otherwise impossible to portray. In a series like One Piece, the most important event of your life can just come and go. The sun rises and sets, and a new most important thing is always on the horizon. You can sense the ways in which the cyclical nature of this series is taking its toll, and One Piece's never-ending gusto shouldn't be mistaken for immortality. This isn't Dragon Ball, which can be revived repeatedly over generations without its "soul" feeling betrayed on some level. One Piece is meaningful because it will someday end, in the same way the sun will eventually expand and consume the earth. The greatest testament to this series' unyielding resilience is how fearlessly it can look into that abyss and still desire to keep moving, to experience every drop of life it can squeeze from the remainder of its withering body. I envy that strength.

Rating: I Abstain.

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