Rousseau's Reviews



Black Lagoon (DUB)



Episode 3

Starting a new job is a strange, awkward experience, like forging a new friendship, making love for the first time, or attending the funeral of someone you only marginally knew. You have to get used to your boss and their temperament. You have to get used to the unique and ofttimes startling personalities of your co-workers, performing a strange balancing act of disclosure with them--keeping people within the bounds of your specific comfort zones and not socializing more than you want as you feel people out. You have to become familiar with the workplace, its secret places (to catch breath and read reddit, or say walk that extra 3 minutes to sit inside the "good" bathroom), as well as the pace/type of work that is produced there. You may have to even interact and meet with clients, who can be total weirdos or worse, shitlords of shit mountain (...or maybe your client wants to kill you for working for rival clients). And at the end of the day, you go home, drink a beer or do some yoga, see what's banging in the DVR, go to sleep, and wake up and do it all again. This is all a new rhythm, a new dance to figure out and reconfigure yourself into.

For our friend Rock, he's spared all the growing pains we normally face. Surely he does go through something like the above, but as a newfound pirate --with this crew-- he's got a totally different way of going about settling in. I get the feeling that as the show will go on we'll see more and more of Rock acclimating, and finding things that puzzle him, and show us he's out of his element. He also, essentially, lives with these people, which is a whole other crazy thing he would have to deal with, but also makes his situation completely different from the norm. I imagine almost all of these people (Dutch, Benny, Revy, and Rock) are actually loners (and the episode bears that out a little bit). Dutch (who we see leave, to which Revy gives not a care) doesn't seem like the sort to interact too much (or rather too deeply). He's a cool-headed leader, but one that doesn't like to get too cozy, outside of a bar at least. Benny seems to be a happy introvert, but I get the feeling he has a secret kid or sick niece or nephew we have yet to see, and he wishes he could do more for them, and he sits in quiet melancholy about it. I dunno... that's my weird Benny theory at least. Maybe he's just a nerd and has an emotional arc over a lost cat or something. Revy, however seems like the sort of person who desperately needs people, but she's too busy being antagonistic and playing that part of her up. I think she tells herself she doesn't need people, doesn't like people, and doesn't want to seem like she wants friends. But I think her odd flashback scene implies that she's wounded and dealing with it poorly. Besides, there is a lot less emotional risk if you don't care about people. However, I call bullshit on her anti-social nature simply because she buys Rock a shirt and then lords it over him. In a certain way, her antagonistic personality is actually her way of expressing friendship. If she gives you shit (or shirt, and she gives Rock both), she actually likes you (...after all, she smiles when she's shooting at her enemies, so emotional expression/direction seems a little miscalibrated). And last is Rock, who, I already kind of marked as the ur-loner in the context of the late-capitalism city-dweller. He's anonymized and atomized... and it is with the crew of Black Lagoon he becomes a part of something again and becomes a someone thusly.

It's under the theme of adjusting to a new job that we find Rock in this episode, and with that adjustment comes Rock's observations about his crewmates on the Black Lagoon.

Mr. J mentioned to me that Rock actually has a desire to not live his old life. He has a secret desire to escape it, and I think this is just as true as his desire to hold onto that life and and be seduced by it; to be a nobody and yet to *not* be a nobody (which I touched on before... Rock, before joining Black Lagoon doesn't know who he is, which is true of nobodies in general: when you're no one, who are you?). I think he had this desire to escape his life's predicament in whatever unseen world he inhabited before episode one, and I think that this tension of desires, and of inhabiting two vastly different worlds will be Rock's throughline in the series. The tension of inhabiting two different worlds plays out in this episode, as Rock is shown sleeping in. and as Revy asymmetrically berates his lack of knot tying skills. He responds to the latter by saying that he never did stuff like this at work. He just filed reports, went on trips and boosted the ego of his boss (which Revy is disgusted by). Rock mentions that his old job was in the Materials Procurement Dept. which if you think about it, doesn't sound all that different from piracy.

However, when he asks Revy about her old life, she gets a little somber, and the screen flashes to some cryptic shots of an apartment building and shell casings falling. Revy indicates that she's always been a criminal and done desperate, dangerous, risky things her whole life to get by and keep on going. Her tone implies tragedy and personal darkness most likely about the loss of her parents and/or sibling(s), but is vague enough to make me uncomfortable and wonder if she was taken advantage of sexually. This all feels like a setup for a larger character backstory reveal down the road, especially as Rock internally wonders what made her this way. Beyond that, though, while Revy doesn't seem contrite, she does have a tinge of regret to her voice, as if to say, if she had a choice, she wouldn't do it again. This ties back into the opening shot of the defaced/crumbling Buddha statue. The implication here is what was once sacred is now profaned and whatever little slice of paradise that this statue guarded has given way to the rotten Roanapur. Likewise, whatever Revy had in her life long ago, has given way to this life, and whatever safe existence Rock had, has been forfeited for a pirate's life on the seas. But then again, the episode kind of turns all that around, and hopeful asks, "Is it really that bad and immoral in Roanapur, with these folks who go out for pizza and beers like a bunch of college kids, who seem to implicitly care about and like one another?" "Is this life really that terrible if in Rock's old world the people he aspired to be led boring lives and carried on criminal activities anyway?" Perhaps the removal of the Buddha's face is a removal of a mask which obscures of vision of the truth: these two worlds aren't that different after all.

Episode wise, this a straightforward bit of familiarizing us with the primary players of Black Lagoon in Rock and Revy. Dutch does get hinted at being a bit of a loner himself, while Benny is barely seen at all. The plot is a little thin here, as the bulk of the episode is on character interactions and development. There's a bit of a run-in that Dutch has with someone, most likely representing Chinese mafia interests. The upshot being that if you work with the Russians (even if a freelancer) you're destabilizing their realm, and they will have their due. A setup occurs and several boatfuls of Chinese mafia goons go out after the Black Lagoon. Here, Rock again goes into boner-awe of Revy's in/superhuman killing abilities, as she literally jumps from ship to ship, blowing people away with a submachine gun and a grenade launcher. In the end the crew is safe and all is well. ...Well, except for the guy who set them up.

Of course Chen, the Chinese mafia guy gets iced by Balalaika, the Russian blonde. She blows him up in his apartment. Just as we saw her brutality in the first episode as she casually has a man (beaten until he gives them information) shot do death, her exacting nature is on display as she has Chen, presumably beaten then tied down, made to watch his life tick away in unison with the slow pooling of gasoline, which eventually trips the ignition on some plastic explosives. She's fucking ruthless. If there is a real unknown in this show, it's her. She's a more capable fighter than she at first appears. She speaks in an effected 'ordinary' accent, revealed to us as she slips into a Russian accent seamlessly. This isn't unlike her demeanor, which equally moves from almost maternal to murderous. Oh, and her crazy scarification is much worse than at first thought. What is this lady's story? Everything about her is a set of jarring contradictions: her appearance, actions, and tone. Overall, it seems like the Russians are in a position to keep and hold onto Dutch and Crew, which could prove problematic considering how gnarly blonde lady is.

As the episode ends, they head to the Yellowflag for drinks, and the final shot is the Buddha that opened the episode. Is the new world terrible and rotten? Is the the old world a pure one that is receding and decaying? Or is it thriving as it always has, but behind some mask? Perhaps these two worlds aren't that different after all (after all Rock is fitting in with this motley crew, headed out for a night with his friends), and maybe it's because there is only one world and it endures as it always has.


Up next is a super review of the three part story covering Episodes 4, "Die Rückkehr des Adlers" ; 5, "Eagle Hunting and Hunting Eagles" ; and 6, "Moonlit Hunting Grounds"!

Odd Bits:

Revy being needlessly aggressive to Rock will always get a laugh out of me. "A retarded monkey could do this!" Her lack of couth is, frankly exactly what I'm attracted to.

Revy's demeanor though in the exchange about Rock's old job, made me think she once tried to be a waitress and it ended with her getting frustrated and just shooting up the place.

Revy gives Rock shit about the shirt. Ah, young love.

Revy rocks a very old walkman, listens to strange electronic music, and then claims to dance the jitterbug (although this is just code for gunfighting). Her cultural-symbolic assemblage is both random and blended at highspeed. (Though Dutch does mention the Cha-cha...)

A profane/murderous parrot. Why? Because Black Lagoon.

Rock should not be in charge of groceries.

Revy almost says the words to House Targaryan: Fire and Blood, in describing the killers sent after them with her phrase, "Blood and smoke." Soooo close... (actually it's closer to the words of the Blackfyres)

That haunting end credits sequence.

This has been a Revy heavy Odd Bits.