Review: Drifters Episode 6: “Men of Destiny”

The guy who helped build the History Channel makes an appearance.

Spoilers Below

The episode begins picking up where episode 5 left off, with Toyo horrified at the sight of these poor Elf women being forced into sex-slavery. As this is going on, Oda and the elves search for documents and important papers all over the castle.

Olminu shows up and Oda asks who it is in the portrait in the castle office’s background and we the audience are shocked to find out the man in the portrait is none other than one of the most despicable human beings on the planet, Adolf Hitler! though it’s an abstract painting of him that makes him look a bit cartoonish and goofy which I’m 100% ok with since monsters like him are unworthy of any respect.

Olminu explains that they have no idea who he was other than he helped establish the Orte’s rise to power with his ability to “capture the hearts and minds of people” and later killed himself yet the motivations behind his suicide are unknown. I started to laugh when Oda expressed the annoyance towards his tiny mustache describing it as “dreadful”.

The Elves show up to inform Oda that Toyo has rounded up every Orte male from the castle they raided to the Courtyard for execution which shocks Oda at his core but quickly deduces what they were doing to the elf women and thinks that Toyo shouldn’t do this kinda work and says to himself “Butchery like this is for a practiced hand” and that such things like execution are his “forte”.

As Toyo is about to give the order to execute Orte sex-offenders via arrows, Oda knocks Toyo out with the butt of his rifle and gives the order himself by screaming “Send them to Hell!” Afterwards, Toyo is understandably pissed at Oda for not letting him give the order but Nobunaga feels he wasn’t old enough to take on such a burden like executing despicable people saying it was “Dirtier work than he wanted him to sully his hands with”. Of course, Toyo punches him back for taking that level of satisfaction away. Much to their shock, one person in glasses from Orte is still alive and was untouched by the arrows. They end up sparing his life because He admits to being a virgin and didn’t know anything about the Orte’s “rape dungeon” because out of happenstance, he just transferred they day they raided.

In Olminu’s narration, the Drifter’s “Heroism” inspires the elves to start a “revolution” of sorts and we get a montage of the elf women who are liberated and reunited with their families & loved ones, with some carrying flyers with a proclamation to spread the word towards other elf villages which help further expand the armies and we cut to a random yet comical scenes of the enigmatic yet sinister “Easy” checking her laptop in her PJ’s with plushies surrounding her and operatic music in the background. As she checks updates about her “Ends” she discovers in furious anger that the Elf village was liberated by our main trio.

This “elf revolution” of course consequently gets the attention of the rest of the Orte Empire that hasn’t been wrecked by Toyo’s crew yet but this scene tells us how royally fucked beyond measure they are. We then are introduced to a newer character in the mix an unknown power player who not only owns a quarter of the Orte Empire but is also definitely a Drifter and one of the most effeminate motherfuckers you will ever see who calls himself Saint Germaine. Germaine talks about one of their ships being under attack which leads to a small cameo of another potential Drifter in the plot, although he runs a WWII battleship and has a small army of Griffon Riders dropping bombs made with “Fish oil and animal fat” screaming “Tora Tora Tora!” It then cuts to a scene with Murasaki’s paper revealing that his name is Tamon Yamaguchi, an Imperial Japanese Navy Admiral.

Germaine during his meeting with the Orte realizes how fucked they are with the Elf forces growing exponentially and after his council meeting, secretly decides to bail on the losing side and join the other Drifters accompanied by two other effeminate individuals who look like medieval gender-swapped characters from “Jem” who all decide to visit the drifters who are helping the Elves which arouses more than their curiosity given their sexual preferences.

I’m not even making insults either, Saint Germaine and his two servants are the closest people we have to LGBTQ characters in this show so far but they’re stereotypically effeminate in an aristocratic way.

We finally get a scene back to Toyo & Oda with Toyo explaining that they decided to let the Elves be leaders of themselves and establish a small government system as he has no desire to be ruler much to Oda’s anger and points out to Oda that given his brutal history as a ruler himself, he doesn’t want to repeat the same mistakes he made.

As Oda orders the Elf troops to carefully pour the “contents of their latrines with caution” into containers, the Elf leader Sharra reports to Oda that their blacksmiths have trouble replicating the gun mechanics of Toyo’s rifle and that they’re better off finding the Dwarves who are experts in that particular craft compared to them which captures Oda’s interest while we get a small montage of Toyo and Yoichi teaching the newbies new fighting skills.

The episode ends on a massive cliffhanger when The Black King sends out some “Ends” to dispatch the Elf village with Gilles and Joan leading the charge and burning their crops as she runs towards the village and the episode ends.

Overview.

I’m not really surprised about the twist of it being Hitler as the Orte’s founder, though Olminu explains that there’s no record if he was a “Drifter” or an “End” but Hirano tends to sometimes recycle Nazis as primary villains so in this case, we can expect this as part of his signature style.

I think part of me appreciated the fact those Elves showed sheer mercy towards whoever that scrawny glasses virgin guy was during the “Orte execution” scene. I realistically think that anyone in a life or death scenario would straight-up confess if they were forced at gunpoint, arrow-point or otherwise to share something as personal as whether or not they have a sex life, but who knows if he’ll have any importance as a character later on.

The song that was playing in the background of easy’s laptop is called “Di quella pira” by Trovatore. When I first read this moment in the manga years ago, I had to look up the song on Youtube and it’s exactly like Hirano to inject classical operatic music in his works though I would’ve expected an obnoxiously sinister girl like Easy to listen to BabyMetal or something terrible like Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift.

The next episode should be a treat since we’ll finally get to see the ingenuity & skill of the “Drifters” vs the devastating supernatural powers of the “Ends”. I can’t wait!