Review: Toonami: The Forge Episode 1

OVERVIEW

While contemplating how they can continue to take care of their growing sandworm larvae Georgia, TOM contemplates where he might have come from, as he has no idea. As if to answer him, the Vindication suddenly is forced to jump through hyperspace to the location of a space station, which soon begins to board them. The leader, a short but powerful being, invades the ship while assisted by hench-bots looking identical to TOM. The being then kills the Clydes and steals TOM back to “The Forge”.

OUR TAKE
Toonami begins its seventh (technically eighth) “Total Immersion Event”, which will go for six episodes from now until December 14th. It’s actually sort of surprising that it’s been almost two years since the previous installment, “Countdown”, back in late 2017. Though really, these sorts of events are pretty strange and unique in and of themselves. Going back to the Cartoon Network days, TIEs were initially more accurate to their naming, as they often involved audience participation in varying ways, from choosing the next engines for TOM’s ship to playing an online game to defeat the event’s antagonist. Things certainly HAPPENED in them, certainly, as many longtime viewers clearly remember the first “Intruder” event that featured the death of TOM 1, but it’s hard to really judge them as stories by themselves without taking the block itself in as context.

Since the Adult Swim revival, TIEs of recent years have shifted to being just focused on narrative, but it still presents some challenges and limitations. One of those being the budget, but you probably couldn’t tell just by looking at these things. The others would be mainly that the characters of TOM and SARA have to stay relatively unchanged, meaning that there can’t exactly be much in the way of character progression. An easy substitute for this so far has been making the development about EXTERNAL change, meaning there would be a status quo shift in setting or characters added and/or changed in design. Intruder 2 ended with the Absolution landing on Shogo 162 and TOM getting a new-ish arm, Intruder 3 ended with Shogo 162 exploding, Sara getting a new floaty pixie form, and the crew getting a new ship (The Vindication), and Countdown basically just made TOM look more battle damaged.

Now with “The Forge”, it looks like we might finally delve into TOM’s origins, especially since we’re meeting robots that look exactly like him. On top of that, he’s well overdue for an upgrade. TOM has gone through many changes over the block’s run, going to his second model after Intruder 1, going from 2 to 3 in a tie-in comic, we learned at some point that TOM 4 (who was the last of the CN hosts) was a separate person, but we’ve never seen how TOM 3 became the current TOM 5. And with a sort of Cowboy Bebop reunion with Beau Billingslea (Jet Black to Steve Blum’s Spike Spiegel) joining as this story’s villain, we could be getting that AND a little history lesson on our favorite late-night block host. These events are definitely a defining trait of Toonami throughout its many iterations and they know how to write to their audience, so I’m plenty thrilled to sit back and watch this unfold until mid-December.