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One Piece
Episode 795

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 795 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 3.6

The Seducing Woods have been the backdrop of the Whole Cake Island for the past handful of episodes, easily standing as some of the most tedious content in the arc, but the worst of it thankfully seems to be in the past as we exit the really strong Vinsmoke stuff and get into the much more interesting set pieces moving throughout the story. The Seducing Woods stuff is there, but this time around it looks a lot nicer and manages to get a handful of genuine laughs instead of tired chuckles, as Luffy hunts down the animals cloned to look like his missing friends.

But beyond that, this episode is packed with intrigue. First, there's Brook and Pedro's discovery that Pudding may not be up to what she says she is, causing us to scratch our heads while Pedro narrowly avoids confrontation with Baron Tamago, a Big Mom pirate he knows all too well. Then there's there's the mafia-style confrontation between Capone Bege and Pekoms on a cliff. These two should be on the same team, with Capone's crew being an arm of Big Mom's, but Capone has no problem executing an ally over a thinly perceived betrayal. There's also the introduction of PEZ, the baby of Capone and Charlotte Chiffon. This character mostly serves as a gesture of how the Big Mom family operates, with major players of the One Piece world getting to join her through marital ties, but more importantly this moment's an extension of Whole Cake Island being the "tee hee, we know which characters have canonically banged" arc, a novelty in an otherwise aromantic show.

The best stuff, however, is between Caesar Clown and Big Mom, two characters who have such an astonishing amount of presence in sound and animation that you almost have to shield your eyes from the beauty of them being in the same room. It's too bad that this sequence was also forced to get so repetitive, but otherwise it was a treat. Poor Caesar just wants a break from the mayhem, but he's wasted so much funding from some of the world's most notorious criminals that he's eternally reaping what he's sown. Even Luffy and Law destroying the S.A.D. factories that Doflamingo provided him doesn't get him an excuse for not working, since Big Mom has made an identical one on Whole Cake based on the same blueprints.

I hope that Caesar never leaves the show and that something will always force him to stick around. That seems reasonable to expect, considering how much both Kaido and Big Mom find him useful and how much mad science stuff has been threading into the main narrative lately. His job this time is to use his nonspecific science smarts to create a gigantism drug so that Big Mom can fulfill her dream of her family meeting her at eye level. This is roughly what Caesar was working on with the children back on Punk Hazard, but now he's been given a hard deadline of two weeks to do the impossible, and Caesar has never seemed like a deadlines kind of guy to begin with.

So here are the story threads at play so far:

  • Pudding may or may not be working with her mother
  • Sanji's dealing with his family, but may have to end up marrying Pudding anyway
  • Luffy and crew are lost in the woods
  • Capone's got something up his sleeve
  • Jimbei's got something up his sleeve
  • Caesar's got to get out of a promise he can't keep

There's some noticeable padding here with repetitive humor and flashbacks to old arcs in an attempt to explain some of the backstory to an audience who might not know everything, but I had a lot of fun with this episode as a great example of what makes a One Piece arc exciting. There's clearly a plan here that will no doubt erupt in some kind of glorious fashion. The more emotional stuff isn't present this time, but for an episode that's full of details and interesting promises, this is a pretty good one.

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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