English Dub Review: Goblin Slayer “Onward Unto Death”

This is the Goblin Champion, my friends.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While visiting the Water Town baths, Priestess runs into Sword Maiden and they commiserate over their respective near death experiences, though she warns her that Goblin Slayer will eventually abandon her. Meanwhile, GS buys a canary for the party’s next trip into the sewers, as a detector for poison gas. Once in the ancient city, they pass by long forgotten monuments to heroes before entering a chamber holding someone captive. The captive has long since turned to bone, meaning this was a trap by the goblins to lure them in before filling the room with gas. The group acts fast to stop it, but know the little beasts will be on top of them the moment they get out. The main goblin force arrives, but with them is a Goblin Champion acting as their leader.

With one blow of its club, GS is sent flying and hacking up blood, shattering Priestess’ composure and her protection spell. In seconds, the goblins surround the rest of the party and begin digging into Priestess and HEA’s flesh…

…until the near death GS rises to his feet and uses the wig of the decoy prisoner to strangle the champion, giving everyone their second wind to fight off the rest of the goblins. It’s not enough to make up for his injuries, leading him to collapse.

OUR TAKE

Well, nice going, Sword Maiden! You pretty much inadvertently planted the seed of doubt that almost got everyone killed! I’m partially kidding, but it does actually play into the theme of this episode regarding great heroes of legend being more or less left to decay or be forgotten. It’s adding more onto the main motif we’ve seen hints off throughout the series so far, particularly that this world (at least in its current state) is long past its more legendary days, or at the very least is in a bit of a mundane rut. As I’ve said, I’ve been pretty fond of how grounded it’s made this seemingly typical fantasy setting, so more of that is welcome in my book.

The big fight this time definitely kept my heart rate up, especially when everything came crashing down and everyone almost died. Though while this show can be pretty ballsy at times, I really wasn’t putting money on them being ballsy enough to murder almost the entire cast AGAIN. And really, this is the natural next step from seeing how well the group worked together last time. If a team story starts with that team completely flowing in battle, the midpoint is where they will find one critical flaw which will cause them to reflect and come back even stronger. It’s looking like we have a couple more episodes in this arc, so there’s just enough time for that.

Though what I should really be mentioning is DAT ENDING! I mean, not the climax of this episode, since I’m sure Goblin Slayer will be just fine by next week (what is it with shows with the character’s name in the title expecting me to think they’d die halfway through the series?). No, what I’m talking about is that odd minute and a half just of the canary’s eye creepily staring at the party. I didn’t learn about this until I saw it in a comment, but that was apparently where the ending credits were supposed to go this week. It supposedly worked like it was supposed to in the Japanese broadcast, but for one reason or another, this got mixed up when the episode was being sent to Crunchyroll, VRV, and here with the Funimation dub, so all us non-moonspeakers got 1.5 minutes of staring at a literal bird’s eye view, followed by the regular ED. Which I like well enough, but this was an odd fumble.