Once again we have an episode in which Bam doesn’t do a whole lot, and once again I find that surprisingly okay.
As Tower of God goes on, I am largely
conditioning myself to accept Bam as the audience surrogate observer.
Like us, he’s basically watching the fight this time around.
And it’s a good fight, displaying the
abilities and inclinations of Anak (who looks to be a momentary
antagonist) and her team the swordsman and track suit guy, as well as
one group of opponents in the team of the angry lady (track suit
guy’s rival, it seems), the sleeping man, and the horned person who
never talks or does much.
While the choreography is nice, I’m
short on reasons to care. The character we have the most investment
in who’s fighting is secondary comic relief and, as someone points
out, it’s a bonus game: there’s not a ton at stake. That is, at
least, until Anak starts going wild with her magic sword, and Black
March starts really responding, to the point where it gets revealed
to her and the world
Then, even in victory, Anak abandons
the game to confront Bam and demand the sword, which he’s barely
keeping in check. With his refusal to give it up, since he’s made a
promise to the contrary, Anak offers Bam a bet (only, it seems,
because she won’t be permitted to attack him on the spot). If his
team can win the ongoing game, she’ll give up her weapon. If they
can’t, Black March is hers. If you’re asking why he’d accept such a
bet when he doesn’t have an interest in claiming Anak’s artifact,
good, because Bam himself asks that, and Anak proves herself a
harsher character than you might have expected by declaring that
she’d take it off his corpse at the very next chance if he refuses.
And thus, finally, we have our main
group entering the fray and something on the line if they fail, which
was badly needed in terms of episode structure. After another
slightly comedic but still decently executed action sequence in which
Khun uses his magic bag to defeat and then distract all comers,
putting Bam on the throne (or so it would seem, I don’t think the
crown touches his head before the episode ends, so they could still
fake us out.), we get the best bit of meat yet when we cut to the
sinister cloaked group that was implied to contain Rachel (and indeed
appears to). A brunette with a psycho smirk asks if it’s alright if
she kills them all and Rachel, with a long look at Bam, has her
answer.
“Yes, of course.”
How serious she is, is another matter,
but even if that’s with a heavy heart, it will hopefully have an
impact on Bam and his world view, given how much of his persona is
very evidently Rachel-focused, when she and her team come out
swinging.
If these write-ups are a little short,
I apologize, but I do think that it’s related to one of the potential
weaknesses of the show (a show that is so far entirely serviceable
but not really particularly special compared to other weird
fantasies) in that there’s not much meat per episode thus far. They
feel short and light, which could be a legacy of Tower of God’s
origin on the web: plots in webcomics often stretch out because the
needs of each page, combined with the release pattern, lead to a
story that’s not structured the same way you would something that is
intended to be collected in chapters, volumes, or episodes: it’s much
more okay to stretch out character growth and forward story motion in
the medium, so if you adapt it directly, even an effective take might
look, well, light.
We’ll see whether or not that continues
to hold true next week.