450: The Escape Team's Hopeless Situation - The Forbidden Technique "Venom Demon"
On Level 3 Ivankov lies unconscious on the floor, covered in Magellan’s poison. However, his finger begin to twitch, and he manages to bring out the syringe bards on his fingertips…
Outside, the marines have surrounded Crocodile and Mr. 1 (Buggy’s unconscious from the fall onto the ship) with weapons trained, and Mr. 1 says that they don’t know who there’re dealing with. Right when the captain is about to give the order to fire, Jimbei surfaces from the sea and calls out his Yarinami (Lance Wave) technique and throws a stream of water so powerful that it punches through the forecastle of the battleship with the force of a cannon, leaving the marines shocked and Jimbei admonishing himself for damaging their getaway ship.
Back inside Impel Down, Luffy’s fight with Magellan continues. Luffy seems to have the advantage with his wax armor, as he beats down the hydra and lands a blow to the warden’s gut that brings him down on one knee. The prisoners start cheering, as it looks like Magellan’s almost finished, but they celebrate too soon, for Magellan gets back up and says that he’s finished with the stalling.
He starts to exude a new, red poison. Luffy tries kicking him, but Mr. 3 wails that the wax won’t work anymore, and quickly retracts the wax before the poison can fully touch it. The new poison begins to ooze towards the prisoners, tainting anything it touches. Magellan then gathers all of it to him, and fashions a large, skeletal golem made from this poison. The prisoners bolt and Magellan makes a swiping motion which the golem copies. Luffy’s able to pull Mr. 3 out of the way in time, but the guy behind them isn’t so lucky and gets doused in the poison. He grabs another fleeing prisoner in panic, and the poison spreads to this second unfortunate chap. As Mr. 3 explains, the poison is spreading like a virus, whether it touches flesh or stone. There’s absolutely no way to fight Magellan now, they have no choice but to run.
Back outside, Crocodile and Mr. 1 make quick work of the hapless marines, as the Sand Sand Fruit and the Dice Dice Fruit render bullets harmless. Jimbei, meanwhile, leaves the ocean depths for the surface.
Eyecatches: Franky and Luffy
Seeing how badly things are going, the Rear Admiral captaining one of the neighboring battleships orders his men to open fire on the one currently being hijacked, as it would be a huge disgrace for the Navy. Unfortunately for them, however, Jimbei surfaces and dumps another huge waterspout on them, ruining the ammunition.
At the entrance to Impel Down Mr. 2 is immensely relieved to see Luffy and the few remaining prisoner’s round the corner, and then freaks out along with everyone else when he sees the poison golem punch through the stone wall after them. Luffy yells if they have a battleship yet, but Mr. 2 shouts back that it still isn’t here. Meanwhile, below, Ivankov, having used an injection of adrenaline on himself, trudges along before collapsing, unable to move any further. So, he uses his Hell Wink to propel himself upwards before crashing through the floor of Level 1, amidst the startled prisoners, before promptly passing out from smashing his head against the ceiling so hard. Both Luffy and Mr. 2 are relieved to see that he has Inazuma with him.
One of the prisoners tosses Luffy a baby telesnail with a call from Jimbei on it. They’ve taken the ship (Buggy’s now awake and praising the others for a job well done), but they won’t be able to get back to the prison in time, since the prisoners have run out of room to run from Magellan. But Jimbei has a plan, they just need to jump into the ocean, a plan which the prisoners don’t care for one bit. Magellan says that they’re free to jump into the sea if they wish, for all that will await them are ravenous Sea Kings. The prisoners wail in despair yet again and pour out of the prison and crowd onto the small pier outside in an effort to put some distance between them and Magellan.
But Luffy’s got one more move left to buy time. First Mr. 3 puts up an extra-large wall of wax to block the golem, while Luffy activates Gear Third, enlarges his leg, and attacks the wall with Gigant Stamp. The golem is thrown back by the force and into the wall. But this isn’t enough to completely stop it. Luffy, wakes up Ivankov and urges him to use his wink again, and for everyone else to grab hold of Ivankov’s head. Magellan yells once again that he won’t allow anyone to escape as the prisoners scramble to do this, and right when he’s about to grab them Ivankov unleashes his Hell Wink and the force propels him backwards and into the air, out of the prison and away from a stunned Magellan’s grasp.
Even though they’ve finally made it out of the prison, it looks like they’ll all fall into the sea after all, but instead, the group lands upon the backs of a huge school of whale sharks! Jimbei apologizes for calling them out to such dangerous waters. Even though the escape team is still within the gloomy doldrums of the Calm Belt, on the backs of these smiling fish, everything seems bright.
The end of Impel Down is almost here, and while this episode wasn't the flashiest art and animation wise (save for the huge Animation Bump during Gigant Stamp) it did a pretty serviceable job throughout. The creation of Magellan's Venom Demon went smoothly, and it's functions remind me of Konomura's Bankai, what with it mimicking Magellan's actions. After the initial creation, it was animated a bit stiffly, however, and towards the end of the chase they ran into the problem of too much exposition during the action that many anime suffer from. While this isn't much of a problem in the manga, the side effect of covering all that is to make it seem like the characters are taking much longer than they should to cross short distances. However, the aforementioned Gigant Stamp scene made up for the episode's earlier weak points was animated splendidly, and it was nice to see Mr. 3 go something with his power besides making keys for people.
The means of escape, Ivankov's wink propelling everyone through the air, was one of those things that are silly yet make perfect sense in execution and hindsight that make up so much of One Piece. The chain of prisoners dangling off of his reminded me of , appropriately enough, the chain of prisoners clinging on to the motorbike in Dead Leaves. The arrival of the whale sharks smacks of convenience to me, but it is a reasonable ability for Jimbei (himself a whale-shark Fishman) considering that the mermaid Camie did something similar earlier on.
Anyway, one more episode of Impel Down to go, and what an episode it will be.
