Watch the video version of this review on YouTube here.

For a short chapter it sure as hell feels like a lot happened this week, and Oda’s building up Egghead to be a much more pivotal arc than I think anyone expected it to be.

With the flashback over, it feels like the cover story should be moving toward an ending soon. It’s already added more to the main plot than most ever do, and I’m interested to see other parts of the world. Beast Pirates? Wano? Kaido and Big Mom? Jump backward and do the Doflamingo Family one that was conspicuously absent? There’s a lot of options.

The opening scene feels like an extension of Sentomaru’s bit in the last chapter, with not much new to say about it. An anime adaptation that wasn’t doing half a chapter per episode might even just run the two scenes together to streamline things and save the back and forth cuts. What a world that would be.

But wait, weren’t Cipher Pol talking about destroying all the ships on the island earlier? Hopefully the good guys got control back before they finished with that or this situation gets dicey real quick. The Sunny runs a skeleton crew (yohohoho) by real sailing ship standards, but I still don’t think there’s room left on it to move the population of a whole island.

One thing I’m not clear on in the S-Snake scene is what exactly explodes for that dramatic ending. It’s not really Pythagoras, is it? Oda has not convinced me he’s staying dead. And what happens with Franky now – too petrified to fight but too conscious to be left alone…

It’s going to take some time, I think, to pin down exactly how much Sanji’s personality changes when his eyebrow flips and his exoskeleton comes back (and I think this chapter makes it perfectly clear that it is back), because the bit about the power of love isn’t something I can see the other emotionless and cruel Vinsmoke kids saying, and it’s hard to say how much of his bloodlust last week was Vinsmoke blood and how much was just the way he gets over an attack on Nami.

One of the big perils of critiquing a series week by week is going on a whole talk about a story element that isn’t feeling right only to have it immediately addressed. Here, it seems the Seraphim are deliberately keeping their flames on and not giving the pirate-CP0 alliance an opportunity to do real damage, as we were all saying they would do if they were smart. We haven’t necessarily solved the issues with the fire system yet, but it’s a step in the right direction and evidence that Oda’s got a plan to make the fight all make sense.

Luffy calling Kaku Usopp and assigning him to babysit Zoro was a great laugh.

So, the Egghead Incident. An attempted repeat of Ohara against an armed nation. A war between the Navy and the science of Egghead crashed by pure chance by the fledgling Emperor Luffy. My question is what exactly is going to make this a battle that shocks the world? Will it just be the magnitude of the people involved – Emperors, Admirals and one of the Five Elders clashing directly? Luffy’s win here would be a huge blow to the World Government’s military and morale in a time of global uprising, which would be a pretty big deal, but things could escalate further still if the narrator actually means the unleashing of ancient knowledge and weapons, perhaps the reactivation of the ancient robot. I don’t want to get my hopes too high, but there are so many exciting possibilities here.

Have we seen the dude with the white stripe in his hair in the Navy officer lineup before? I like his look. Oda finds a way to put memorable character designs in the most random of places.

And we close on the shock reveal of the enemy inside the lab – the traitorous Vegaclone York! So when it comes to writing mysteries, you can do ones where the reveal makes everything slide into place and leave clues that make sense in hindsight. These are generally solvable in advance by design. Kanjuro was this kind of mystery foe. His birds flying away after arriving in the future, his tendency to comically impede his allies and the whole lefthandedness thing gave us what we needed to figure him out. But you can also play your mystery as a straight up twist. No real clues, just something to take the audience totally off-guard. York is that kind of mystery.

And while most (myself included) will say they prefer the first kind of mystery, there’s nothing inherently wrong with keeping readers on their toes with a twist villain every once in a while. Provided it at least doesn’t outright contradict what’s been shown previously.

And I think York mostly passes that bar. The Vegaclone designed for indulgence wants the lifestyle of the most decadent people in the world, I can buy that. S-Snake forcing the others off the walkway immediately after petrifying her and Oda never showing us the top again is a fun misdirect, looking back. Unfortunately, it’s coming out that she was present in the control room at the time the Frontier Dome went down. Did she set something in the system for a timed outage, or did Oda just slip?

And I definitely remember thinking the timing window for the traitor was the hijacking of the Seraphim to start the death game was very tight for a Vegapunk to get away with. There’s something like a 14 page span between the Seraphim being taken out of CP0’s command and asked to stand down and the Vegapunks all being present again in the control room, getting ready to depart. And unlike the Frontier Dome with who knows what kind of wifi or remote terminal access, you have to do the Seraphim in person. But looking at that control room scene, York is on her feet, Sanji is reacting to her like she’s just arrived, and she’s yawning like she just came from a nap. It actually tracks with her going off to do something nefarious. I wouldn’t call it a clue, you’d never catch it on a first reading, but it keeps the continuity in check.

I’m interested to see where we go from here. The vacant expression and cutsey way she talks, even about killing Shaka, makes it easy to forget that York has that Vegapunk intellect. That contradiction should give her a unique stage presence among One Piece villains, if nothing else. But will her deal with the Elders really work out like she hopes? Doflamingo had the blood, similar forbidden knowledge leverage and a whole nation’s military might and was never reinstated. Maybe a big disillusionment here will be key to York turning back to the crew’s side and ordering Usopp and Franky unpetrified. Maybe we get a York redemption where she holds back the Navy so the crew can escape in the style of Flim Z’s final scenes, but that’s getting way ahead of things. We’ll just wait and see how things develop.