Episode 1149 of One Piece delivers another heaping portion of stunning lore reveals for essentially the entire runtime.
I won’t sugarcoat it, folks, this week is more of the same. I don’t intend that as an outright criticism, mind you. It’s just that the fundamentals haven’t changed a lot in the last few weeks. Egghead Island is burning, Vegapunk’s post-mortem reply-all is blasting the airwaves, and things that are verboten to the World Government are being revealed for all to hear. If you’re enjoying all that, then boy howdy are you served well by this week’s One Piece – and if you were hoping for something else for a change, then you’re plum outta luck, partner.
That means your relative enjoyment is going to come from how much these lore drops are part of your One Piece experience. For myself, they’re interesting, but I think the impact is lessened by having them all packed together like this. I like to have a big lore reveal, then spice it up with a little more action or character exploration. Having Vegapunk talk non-stop and drop lore bomb after lore bomb ends up making each tidbit less impactful than it might be otherwise. Your mileage may, as always, vary. The flip side of the coin is that we get lore drops so infrequently, and One Piece has such an expansive background that maybe we need a few multi-episode diatribes just to get it all out there. Oda isn’t exactly getting any younger, after all. And despite the rapid-fire nature of the reveals, they are genuinely interesting and widen our understanding of the Void Century, the World Government’s cover-up attempts, and the soon-to-be crisis facing the entire world.
Massive sea level rise certainly seems like the kind of ticking clock that can change the nature of life across the world of One Piece.
In and amongst the continuous exposition conveyor belt, we do see a few choice character moments and animation cuts. Stussy and Edison’s conversation leads to a rare moment of emotional vulnerability among Cipher Pol operatives. It was nice seeing Stussy and Kaku experience emotions other than stoic resting spy face stuff, because it so rarely happens for their archetypes in the series. As far as animation is concerned, I thought the Iron Giant sequence was wonderful. The Toei team captured the lumbering power of its implacable advance, and the shot of its reflection in the navy officer’s binoculars stole the whole episode. Great play on the rounded lens and ominous orange/red lighting.