We finally step outside the Poneglyph room and get some fresh air as we inch closer and closer to the end of the Zou arc. The backdrop may have changed, but the piles upon piles of exposition have not stopped being rolled out.
It's in this episode that Luffy makes his next plan of action explicitly clear: Retrieve Sanji from Big Mom's clutches before returning to his newly formed alliance to fight Kaido in the samurai country of Wano. His allies agree to this term, feeling good about the support that somebody as strong as Sanji could provide in the upcoming battle. So that settles it, the next arc destination is Whole Cake Island.
I'm not kidding when I say that this is an exposition heavy episode, as there's very little to talk about beyond the lore nuggets that the characters keep dropping. It's a continuation of what we had been seeing in the past few episodes, and my comment last week about the repetition still rings true. Thankfully, however, it all happens while the characters are walking outside on their way to get the plot started back up, so there is at least a tiny bit of forward momentum. The new information this week centers around Cat Viper and Dogstorm's history, back when they were Oden's retainers and followed him on his adventures, both on Whitebeard's pirate ship as well as Roger's. Dogstorm is also able to quell Nami's concerns about getting off track from the log pose, saying that the Straw Hats' journey to Raftel via the Poneglyphs has already taken them the step beyond. I'm still not really sure if this information makes sense to me. There's a lot of talk about whether the final island at the end of the log pose is indeed Raftel or not, and things only got more confusing as a result of the given information.
Visually, I was incredibly close to saying that this was a beautiful looking episode with it's nice landscape shots of Zou, but then I saw Nami. This is one of those episodes where the women's figures are exaggerated to an uncharacteristic degree, even by this show's standards. I get that Oda draw his women with skinny waists and big boobs, but I can't recall a time where his drawings ever looked as obnoxious as they are here. It's clearly a deliberate style choice that comes with certain artists or directors, and it just looks like garbage. Fanservice as tone deaf and ugly as this makes the show as a whole worse, and it's far and above one of the most unfortunate things about the modern One Piece anime.
The action should pick up next week as Jack re-enters the frame, but the story's got us so focused on Whole Cake Island right now that he feels more like an inconvenience. This isn't a bad episode, but it's a little too draining at this point in the story to dedicate this much time to info dumps, especially since the best information was given to us several episodes ago.
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We finally step outside the Poneglyph room and get some fresh air as we inch closer and closer to the end of the Zou arc. The backdrop may have changed, but the piles upon piles of exposition have not stopped being rolled out.