No, we’re not done with vignettes.
That’s because a big chunk of the middle of this episode is meeting, learning the background of, and dealing with an event with another pair: an Emishi kid (sentenced to death for being Emishi, after the kid’s whole village was slaughtered because they led some samurai there) and the partnered executioner, who feels like the kid is innocent and should be saved. They try to escape the island by boat and find a ship graveyard with kraken tentacles and the flower-ridden remains of the douchey executioner who confronted Sagiri in the first episode on the island. Guess there were a few things he didn’t foresee.
Anyway, they discover through this that the currents mostly don’t lead away fron the island, and escaping will be far harder than just tagging boat. Since some of the flowerized samurai returned, there clearly is a way out, but it’s not going to be easy. It’s also revealed that Emishi kid is a girl, in a little spot of humor since it gets her executioner flustered. Along the way, we deal with her grief and regret over essentially having doomed her village and being responsible for all the deaths in it, weighed against her obligation to carry on for the tribe, finally weighed against her assigned executioner urging her to live for herself. So, they exist, I guess.
In team ninja’s scenes, sandwiching this interesting and fun but also kind of intrusive episode, Sagiri recovers from her poisoning, we get some scouting reports and talk about how the island is incomprehensible, and a lot of opposition from the big strong looking executioner to Sagiri’s continued presence. He insists she get on the fast boat back home because she is a woman and should be doing woman things, leave the scary island to the men. He rather harps on this fact, until Sagiri (after something of a heart to heart with Gabimaru where he tells her that he’s sensed she’s stronger than he is) makes an appeal to live as a samurai, since either way one side of the world hates her.
Just as our tough guy seems about to relent in the face of a demonstration of Sagiri’s ability, the giant masked prisoner who ate his assigned executioner in a brief cut in an earlier episode appears and goes ahead and drops the dude in one hit from behind (because somehow a guy the size of a mountain can sneak up on a trained samurai. Twice.), leaving him facing off against Sagiri as the episode ends.
I want to say that Hell’s Paradise is, so far, a good show. It’s got a nice creepy and threatening atmosphere and while I had complained about Sagiri’s last couple of episodes or the way it cuts to mini-stories for someone else in the middle of things happening, I think the characters are strong as well. The plot is taking its sweet time – it seems to be stranger than a basic survival story, but it’s not keen to reveal how so in a timely fashion. That’s okay, though, because these individual backstories are interesting and entertaining on their own.
It does mean that I’m somewhat concerned about the fact that we’re five episodes in. That’s close to the halfway point, and it’s not going to reach a conclusion in that time unless it heats up and picks up in a big way. Which it could, but having made the stylistic choice to go like this, it could also clearly keep on as-is.
I guess we’ll just have to see how the season plays out.