English Dub Review: Drifters “Serious Bomber”

Bombs away!

Spoilers Below

While Count Saint-Germain and his equally effeminate subordinates journey to the Elven village to meet with the Drifters, Toyo’s group attacks the Orte Empire’s largest armory in a town called “Gadolka” to save the enslaved Dwarves who are being forced to forge weapons for them.

As a major call-back to the previous episodes, everything has seemingly culminated to this moment with Oda teaching the Elves a lesson in incendiary science by utilizing the newly created gunpowder that Oda has carefully concocted with the Elves’ assistance, in the form of small-boxed sized bombs and explosive arrows for their archers to use.

While this is going on, Toyo leads the charge against the Orte troops stationed there which leads to a small comedic scene of the Elves attempting a “War Cry” to scare the troops shitless. Everything starts going smoothly and leads to one of the best cleverly written moments in the Manga when they trap an Elite Branch of Orte Troops called the “Armored Guard Corps” within a giant enclosed box made with those stone-wall spell papers of Olminu’s Octoberist magic, afterwards the Elves proceed to toss bombs over the enclosed space they’re trapped in, blowing them all to hell.

Just as Toyo’s crew are about to enter the castle, they encounter a minor setback in the form of the heavily walled gate of the castle raising back up when the Orte soldiers quickly close the entrance in panic.

As Oda tries to think of a solution, Hannibal out of nowhere begins to make strange hand motions which shockingly gives Oda an idea. Oda then asks for a messenger, but one of the elf-kids instead gives Oda the Octoberist Orb to contact Olminu & Yoichi directly and this leads to another cleverly written moment, when Yoichi’s archery skills are used in combination with Olminu’s Octoberist stone wall spell-papers to cast a well-organized staircase alongside the gate, enabling Toyo’s group to invade the town and free the Dwarves.

We then cut to a random scene when we gaze into Oda’s inner-thoughts that the Drifters differences in perspectives could possibly “change the battlefield” due to them being Outsiders who creatively utilize their resources differently than everyone else and wonders what the “endgame” is if they win and then Murasaki says to himself out loud, “Your right, you are outsiders, which means you and your fellow Drifters see that for good or ill, the others cannot…Go and turn the old world on its head, without change there can be nothing but atrophy. Break the paradigm as only you can Drifters!”

When Toyo finally busts open the door where they’re forcibly kept, it leads to a mildly disturbing moment in that’s also straight from the manga, when he notices how malnourished the Dwarves looked. Also the “bunk-houses” the Dwarves were all forced to sleep in is eerily similar to the living spaces of holocaust victims. There’s even a heartbreaking scene when the Dwarves beg the Elves for help to the point that they even don’t care about their past grudges towards them anymore. Aside from who Orte’s founder was, it’s about a subtle as a shovel to the face that the Orte are “Medieval Nazis” at this point.

Since the Dwarves are extremely malnourished during their captivity, Toyo orders food to be prepared for them saying “An Army marches on its stomach” which sounds harmless at first until Oda receives a status report about it and warns them to stop when he hears that they’re “butchering horses for meat”. (If you’re an animal lover, this thankfully happens off-camera) Oda knows how essential the horses are and asks them to make “rice porridge” as a substitute and further warns Olminu that “solid food can kill a starving person” and tells them to eat slowly since that’s all they can do for them at the moment which then cuts to a random comedic scene of him screaming to himself “I miss rice!”

After a random comedic moment, Toyo later negotiates with the remaining Orte troops to surrender peacefully and allows them to escape, but decapitates their commander when he refuses to perform Seppuku to “preserve his honor”.

When Yoichi prepares to pursue the fleeing troops, a habit he developed when serving his despicable boss Yoshitsune in the past, Toyo stops and tells him that he doesn’t have to follow dishonorable orders anymore since this is their battle, they fight as equals which gives Yoichi a great sense of relief and they go back to the feast with the now liberated Dwarves.

We now are at the final scene of the episode when a member of the Octoberists and his werewolf partner, Doug, spy on the Ends who had invaded Carneades way back in episode 3. What the two both discover is a large dragon approaching the castle that’s supposedly called the “Bronze Dragon” and according to Doug’s brief explanation, he’s one of the “Six Great Dragons” of this middle earth-like fantasy world and wonders why he’s even here.

As the two spies further investigate, they shockingly find out that The Black King has taught these otherworldly monsters in his army, primitive agriculture skills. The Octoberist spy comes to the conclusion that The Black King’s intentions are to replace the humans with these monsters and become their “Savior” once the Ends have completely destroyed humanity.

Overview.

Despite the small introduction of Doug, It’s never explained who the fuck this guy is other than he’s a werewolf who works for a separate organization from the Octoberists called the “Adventurer’s Guild”. At the time of this review, The Manga has yet to explain anything further about this “Guild” but hopefully, Hirano will touch upon them later at some point.

The scene when we gaze into Oda’s inner-thoughts really displays how much of a competent strategist he can be and when recognizing such advancements in warfare for the first time and is very quick to understand the impact they can make in the battlefield. Oda has often expressed a very sinister joy after his exposure to more modern technological advancements. First with Butch & Sundance’s Wild-west firearms such as the gatling gun, and now with the Octoberist’s Orbs which in a nutshell are basically magical walkie talkies.

After liberating the Dwarves thanks to the efforts of the Elf troops, the three Drifters, and Olminu’s Octoberist magic, they’ve further reached another step towards possibly conquering Orte in the coming weeks and theoretically, while we sort-of know the Black King’s goals from seeing him train those monsters to grow crops, we don’t know what Saint Germain’s endgame is in all this. Hopefully, we’ll find out in episode 10.