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One Piece
Episode 870

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 870 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 4.6

Current state of the fight: both fighters can see the future, both have Devil Fruits that allow them to stretch and contort in unpredictable ways, and both are nursing life-threatening injuries in their abdomens. There's less than an hour left before Luffy's supposed to exit the mirror world and reunite with his friends, so it's time for him to pull out all the stops and finish this stupidly long fight once and for all.

Luffy's new Snakeman form isn't a significant departure from the usual Fourth Gear transformation. It's a bit leaner and meaner, and it emphasizes speed over raw power. His most important trick is his enhanced Gum-Gum Culverin, where he can redirect a punch in mid-air while maintaining its acceleration. If he moves fast and erratically enough, he can circumvent Katakuri's Observation Haki, so now this fight is both a high-speed anarchic brawl and a mind-bending game of 3D chess where the chess pieces happen to be fists. There's at least one corner of my brain that has reservations about the over-stylized nature of One Piece's flashier animators, but that issue is on hold this week because an episode like this is exactly where those guys belong. It looks jaw-dropping from beginning to end. This climactic fight episode is hectic, silly, and absolutely massive in impact and scope.

This is an adaptation of a pretty famous manga chapter that was all zany fight choreography with minimal dialogue. This episode does a good job spreading the action out over the course of twenty minutes without losing steam, but it's not without its crutches. Mainly, the anime is still pushing the Rayleigh flashbacks in order to pad the runtime. I didn't need a filler scene where Rayleigh demonstrates Fourth Gear's speed weakness, but I really dug the cutaway to Rayleigh and Shakky pouring one out for Luffy just as he and Katakuri are delivering their final blows. "Only those who are living in the present can make a new epoch." (But maybe let this show live in the present for a bit instead of flashing back every five minutes.)

The Katakuri fight is an important fixture of Whole Cake Island because it's the arc's last opportunity to portray self-indulgence as heroic and positive. This fight has nothing to do with what's going on in the rest of Totto Land anymore, it's just two dudes beating on each other to feel alive. The violence, the chest-thumping machismo, the aimless self-destruction—for a moment, these things are good, but they do exist in a context that will unfold in the story's final moments. As of this episode, the true outcome of the fight is left up in the air. Surely it'll be Luffy who walks away when all is said and done, but the question of who really beat who is of little consequence. This fight was for them, not us.

In the grand scheme, the Katakuri fight is a mess in execution, but it's the kind of mess where the soul of the work is able to spin that imperfection into strong self-expression. The emotional weight of the experience is incredibly back-heavy, with most of the leadup meandering without enough propulsion to keep things interesting until the spontaneous bouts of extreme enthusiasm happen. But when it's good it's transcendent, and even at its most blunt, it always preserves that One Piece-y sense of humor. How can you not love a 'roided out goth boy screaming about how tough he is while transforming into a donut for no other reason than because he just really loves donuts?

At last, this is the beginning of the end.

Rating: A

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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