English Dub Review: No Guns Life “A Place to Call Home”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

A captive Mary watches as Juzo faces Victor, her brother and Juzo’s former engineer during the war, thinking that Juzo should be able to beat him. That is, until some headless Extended drones get in the way, though Juzo is able to beat them all handily too. Victor uses this as a distraction to use his powers of disassembly to blow out Juzo’s back and then reach inside his chest to torture him and trigger his other modes. He also reveals that, as the thirteenth (and supposedly final) Gun Slave unit, Juzo’s job was as the Brethren Slayer, apparently killing the rest after the war was over. Mary can’t take seeing her friend being tortured by her brother and gives Juzo a distraction so that he can hold Victor in place while Mary pulls Juzo’s trigger, destroying him.

…or at least, destroying a spare body of his, so while he’s unconscious, he’s probably out there somewhere recovering. However, this actually gives Lefty the hand a chance to speak and reveal that he is actually the REAL Victor! Or at least, the original good Victor, while the other one is like a “shadow self” that was born during his research as Juzo’s engineer. He went into the job hoping to keep soldiers off the front lines with remote controlled Extended technology, which turned out to be similar to what Harmony does. When their initial experiments with one sub-brain couldn’t keep up with the information coming through, Victor suggested using two and connecting them directly the two hemispheres of the brain. He acted as the first test subject, but the experience of the war through his remote body showed him the true horrors of the battlefield, traumatizing him so much that it warped the sub-brain and created this new self that was bent on destroying all Extended and began with killing the rest of the researchers, going on to work with Spitzbergen

Dark Victor begins to wake up, knocking real Victor out again, but he tells Juzo to destroy Dark Victor as his next job, though Juzo says it’ll cost him. Before they can get going, however, Avi Cobo shows up and apprehends them.

OUR TAKE
We finally get some explanation on Victor’s major bad guy glow up and it’s both quite interesting AND a little bit of a let down. The main part of it being that this both is and IS NOT Victor, but decidedly not since it’s actually just a robot brain that absorbed his traumatic experiences and formed a person out of that. On one hand, this works nicely with the ongoing theme in this series of well meaning people being horribly changed by war as shown through weaponizing them with Extended technology, of which Juzo is the most prominent example seeing as his face is a friggin gun. Though in this example, Victor’s deal is more that he just happened to make a guilty feeling Terminator who is spun-off from one aspect of his personality and has taken his body.

While this is an intriguing idea, it kinda drains the conflict of the moral quandary that was Mary and Juzo fighting someone whom they both previously cared for. I mean, it will still be a bummer if they have to kill good Victor to kill bad Victor, but that doesn’t really have the punch it should, especially since Victor is now basically blameless for his evil robot clone’s bad deeds. I’m still plenty interested in seeing how this resolves, but it feels like they kinda depleted another potentially compelling facet of the whole thing. Instead of dealing with how Victor really did fall down the dark path because of his involvement with the war and how this implies or sets up further issues in the future, we have one good real Victor and one bad fake Victor. Just kind of a wasted opportunity, I think. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, it just ends up feeling it could’ve bene more, ya know?

But since this was a pretty single focused episode, that’s really all there is to talk about this week. We’re now a quarter of the way into this second batch and things seem to be continuing at a pretty brisk pace, so I continue to not really have any major complaints with this story! I also feel like I can reasonably expect it to not really disappoint me in the rest of the season, which I feel like is both a blessing and a curse. As much as I enjoy both watching and covering this show, it’s a bit hard to talk about in detail when it’s always pretty much solid, but I’m sure I can get by with that for the remainder of the season.