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One Piece
Episode 979

by Grant Jones,

How would you rate episode 979 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 4.6

Boss Kyoshiro has arrived and attacked the Beast Pirates vessel. The reason is that he is secretly none other than Denjiro in disguise, and he reveals his true identity to Kinemon and the others. In a continued string of good fortune, even more reinforcements arrive for our heroes in the form of 1200 additional samurai and their craft. Everyone is shocked by this turn of events, given that no one had arrived thus far and Orochi had used his many resources to attack the ships at port and destroy bridges. The arriving samurai explain that they actually understood Kinemon's secret message hidden in the writing of the coded note - they were to go to another port entirely! Kinemon is roundly congratulated by everyone for his brilliant foresight and planning.

...which he clearly did not do. Kinemon is reluctant to say anything, but the other Red Scabbards know he made a mistake and that it was a stroke of luck that things turned out this way. Still, better to be lucky than good, and now the assault on Onigashima and the Fire Festival has a fighting chance. Sadly, there is still great danger in this moment as Kanjuro is attempting to escape with Momonosuke as his hostage. Kawamatsu tries to stop him, but Kanjuro manages to break away using a meticulously drawn bird. It turns out that the “drawings dissolving in water” aspect was yet another layer to his ruse, and much to everyone's amazement he flies away as the to be continued card flashes.

Another perfectly solid episode for the Wano arc. After the visual tour de force of last week's entry with Luffy, Law, and Kid attacking the Beast Pirates ship, I expected we'd have something of a “breather” episode this week. By and large this was nowhere near that energy but I can't hold that against the Toei team, I'd rest on my laurels a bit too after all that. Still, the episode was more than appealing visually and had a few brilliant touches I thought. A particularly nice bit of framing was when Ashura was about to cry and he leaned his head down, allowing for a single raindrop to fall off the edge of his hat right where his eye/tear would normally be.

In terms of the content, this is one of the more hilarious and memey moments in Wano. Kinemon's “excellent plan” being a giant goof-up is a hilarious character beat, and his glum face replete with runny nose has to be one of the more enduring images of this arc (and that is saying something). I loved the build up to it as well, with all the visual explainers for the linguistic fun at play and thought the anime did a great job selling the scene. The Akazya Nine ribbing him over it was great too. Even after all the Wano we've seen and all these great moments, it's amazing to think that there is still more to come.



Rating:


Grant is the cohost on the Blade Licking Thieves podcast and Super Senpai Podcast.

One Piece is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.com. Save on Anime Streaming Subscriptions with Funimation.

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