English Dub Review: No Guns Life “Imprisoning Binds”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kronen and Kunugi briefly tussle before Juzo’s fight with Seven gives Kunugi the opportunity to escape. Said fight has Juzo looking back on his time eliminating other Gun Slaves, as well as knowing that Seven is much like himself back when he thought to take orders. This introspection leads to Juzo being caught up in one of Seven’s blasts and made seemingly helpless when he’s left without his legs, but he still refuses Pepper’s offer to join her. This buys enough time for Kronen to bring Tetsuro over and actually do exactly what Wachowski wanted: for Tetsuro to use Harmony in order to force Juzo to unlock his full potential and fight back. What Tetsuro doesn’t count on is getting inside Juzo’s mind and learning about Juzo’s past as a soldier who eventually helped take down most of the other Gun Slaves, but deciding once he slaughtered most of them that he would make his own decisions.

OUR TAKE

The Juzo vs Seven fight unloads its opening salvo, though the fight itself is actually a minor part of the episode. The most that happens of it is a few punches, a big laser, and then standing around some rubble for a little bit. This is clearly set up for the later stages as the end of the episode strongly hints at, but my point is that the majority of this episode is a more internal fight than external, namely Juzo fighting conflict within himself and his past mistakes. After having quite a bit of focus on how he singlehandedly took out the majority of the other twelve Gun Slave Units, we finally get to see what happened, specifically how he ended up leading them into a trap so he could kill them all at once. We also see that this was the turning point for him, with those death being the push he needed to finally act as his own person and not just a gun to be used. This is probably the most defining moment of Juzo’s past, so if there were any time to finally learn about it, it would be now.

This puts the fight between him, Seven, and Pepper in a bit more thematic context. Pepper simply wishes to make Juzo a tool for her use like Seven is, which completely goes against what Juzo wants for himself now. In that sense, Juzo’s fight isn’t against Seven, since Seven is simply a tool, but more against Pepper, the one who is pulling the trigger. Which isn’t quite what this big fight was billed as and…not that much more compelling either way, as Pepper is not all that interesting a character on her own. Heck, I still sometimes confuse her with her sister, the one from the first couple episodes who looks distractingly similar. So all the heavy lifting for the story is done by Juzo and his own tragic backstory, which he is luckily quite able to do. I just can’t help but think about how this could have been enhanced by having a more compelling rival to go against. And we still haven’t even quite seen the full fight yet, so perhaps things will escalate enough on that end to make up for these shortcomings. After being more or less consistently satisfied with the series thus far, I don’t expect it to land on a sour note, but I don’t exactly expect to be impressed. We’ve got two more bullets in the chamber for the season, so we’ll see.