Black Lagoon 001: The Second Barrage

It's a little confusing how volume one of Black Lagoon 001: The Second Barrage is listed as containing Episodes 13 through 16, but that's essentially because the show's second season picks up right where the 12-episode season one of Black Lagoon 001 left off. It's about a year later, and naïve young salaryman Rocky is still young and naïve, an actual nice guy in the nest of casual killers that is the crew of the gunboat Black Lagoon.

This volume features surprisingly little of Revy and the Black Lagoon crew, however. The first three episodes tell a complete story arc about a pair of hired assassins who come to the ship's home base, in Roanapur, Thailand, and seriously upset the several local crime syndicates by going on a murder spree. The assassins are seemingly a couple of young children, brother and sister, though their eerily sexualized behavior with each other, their fascination with the smells of blood and death, their propensity for ghastly torture and their twisted worldview all point at much older, more vampiric psyches at work. As they cut a bloody swath through Roanapur, giggling madly about how their antics will get everyone in town chasing them, the Black Lagoon Company's sometime employer Balalaika winds up working with other criminal leaders to bring the kids down.

The fourth episode on the disc launches a new plotline, as a prim expert forger named Greenback Jane winds up in hot water after she blows a deadline and her employers decide that she's stringing them along. After they kill her confederate to prove a point and she realizes that without him she can't make the project work, she escapes and attempts to seek sanctuary in a church. Unfortunately for her, it's Roanapur's Church of Violence, a cover for drug and weapon trafficking, where Revy's kill-crazed sometimes-friend and faux-nun Eda hangs out. When Jane's employers come for her, Eda, Revy and other church members smell money and drive them off in a hail of gunfire, but a batch of high-powered bounty hunters are on the way in to turn the tide.

Not for kids

Often, in describing films or TV, "adult content" is a euphemism indicating sexual content. Black Lagoon is the rare adults-only series that just isn't that interested in sex. It pays some attention to Revy's scanty mode of dress and Eda's huge boobs, but it's far more interested in outsized violence, extravagantly foul language, immense sprays of blood and what may be the bleakest, most amoral world in anime. The heroes are casual killers; the "villains" are only distinguished by the fact that they actually love hurting people instead of only doing it for money, or out of boredom. Rocky is in theory the moral center of the story, but he barely makes an appearance in this volume, which is so messy (and so over the top that it skirts the edge of tongue-in-cheek) that it feels like watching a cut of Kill Bill with no Bride to root for.

Like Kill Bill, though, the series looks pretty terrific. The animators pay special attention to the physics of speeding cars, firing guns and exploding ordnance. Black Lagoon still isn't as stylish as Cowboy Bebop, but it still wants to be that show's black-sheep cousin, with its lanky, fluid characters, hip aesthetic and focus on style. As with so much anime, the fights get special attention; the guns and the damage they do are exaggerated to the degree that one of the vampire kids has a gun twice her size, but any ridiculous comedy value is just as intentional as the excitement of all the massive damage to property and lives.

Some of Black Lagoon 001's early episodes were a little talky and convoluted, with more flamboyant posturing than actual satisfying action. But the new season kicks off in breathless style. There's still a lot of posturing—at one point, Revy and Eda get into an almost South Park-esque argument about which of them is an ugly she-male with balls and which of them is going to tear the other one's balls off—but there's just as much thrill. It's more than a little disturbing, but it's a solid adrenaline rush nonetheless.

The first plotline here, with the "vampire" kids, is my favorite Black Lagoon story so far. It's seriously chilling, for a lot of reasons I can't get into at all without spoilers. But it manages to tease the borderline of goofy one minute and be actually unsettling the next, with revelations about the kids' true natures. -Tasha