Black Lagoon: The Second Barrage

Call Black Lagoon the delinquent of the Class of ‘06. In theory, it’s the story of everyman Rokuro (Rock after the first episode or so, and from here on out) getting caught up in the hyperviolent crime world of the fictional Thai sin city of Roanapur. In practice, Black Lagoon is both broader and simpler. If you deign to imagine every crime thriller of the past 35 years tossed into a blender and animated in a mid-aughts style, you’ve already got the gist of the show. Lagoon is not, by any means, a complicated anime. To put it the way that one of the dub’s dramatic narrated moments might, it’s a show that follows only one real rule: if the narrative is getting sluggish, have someone bust in with a gun.

The series follows a core cast of four, who, collectively, make up the mercenary Lagoon Company. The aforementioned Rock, a Japanese salaryman who is kidnapped as an incidental detail in a job gone wrong. He’d be your straight man, the person with a moral compass that’s closest to normal, and a fondness for white button-up work shirts and ties. Then there’s Revy, a Chinese-American girl from New York and a loose cannon in almost every possible sense of the term. She’s the wild one, a firearm expert who favors a pair of pistols (hence her nickname; Two-Hands), swears like a lumberjack who just lost a leg, and just generally doesn’t give a fuck about anything. There’s Benny, a Jewish-American IT tech who is, pardon the term, “the chill one”. And rounding out the cast is Lagoon Company captain Dutch, an African-American (noticing a trend?) ex-soldier defined by a pair of sunglasses and a cool head.

Calling the cast ‘colorful’ is underselling them. Revy is the most obviously characterful but all four members of the core cast perform strongly, even Benny. Rock in particular manages to usually nail the unenviable task of being the non-action character in an action show. Often he’s able to talk his way out of things that by all rights he really shouldn’t be, especially as the series nears its end.

Outside of the main four, there are a number of B-characters that help color the world of the series. Among these are Sister Eda, a promiscuous nun employed by the gun-toting Ripoff Church who essentially serves as a second Revy. The absolutely riveting Balalaika, head of the Mafiya-affiliated Hotel Moscow. The indestructible and outrageously-heavily-armed Colombian maid (and, we find out, ex-FARC-EP guerrilla) Roberta. Mob bosses like the Triad head Mr. Chang and a number of more rarely-appearing characters help too. On the antagonistic side, you’ve got Neo-Nazis, terrorists, the Italian-American Mafia, and a smorgasbord of other Action Movie villains.

It’s here worth mentioning the strong dub performances. Almost everyone is voice acted bare minimum solidly, and many are actually very good. Of special note are those by Dutch, whose actor Dean Redman is probably better known as the voice of various animated Nick Fury incarnations nowadays, and that of Balalaika. Patricia Drake (best known as Trunks in Dragonball Z) brings an absolutely bone-chilling aura to her performance that makes the character simply magnetic to watch. It’s arguably the show’s strongest vocal performance overall and it’s a shame that it’s one of just a handful that she ever brought to the medium, being mostly a western animation VA.

Finally there’s that of Roberta, whose cold performance is quite literally accented by a slight Colombian Spanish accent, her vocal tone really selling the character’s steely strength.

The script on the other hand is a bit of a bumpier ride. There are a lot of obviously-altered or adlibbed pieces of dialogue. References to American pop-culture like Sears and western films abound, and the cursing is colorful but believable. On the other hand, the script shows its age with liberal peppering of terms like “retarded” around. It’s the sort of thing where it’s hard to hold it against the show per se, since what’s considered acceptable language has changed over time, but if you’re a certain sort of person it’s liable to make you wince a bit. On the other hand, one can definitely hold the character of Shenhua, who is Taiwanese, against the show. Shenhua’s actual vocal performance is competent, but she’s dubbed in a highly stereotypical yellowface accent that is just not a good look for anyone involved. Not helping is the fact that her in-series nickname is “Chinglish”. Shenhua is the one point where the show’s script inarguably passes a line across ‘rude humor’ and fully sails out into ‘downright offensive’, and it’s a serious mark against an otherwise very strong dub.

Visually, the show is competent but not terribly innovative. It mostly works in muted color palettes and while some of the action sequences it executes are a bit atypical for anime, there’s really nothing groundbreaking here. Craft, not new ideas, carry Black Lagoon in this department. The CGI cars haven’t aged super-well, but it’s hard to blame the show itself for that, and other than occasional over-obvious tricks like frame-shaking to simulate vibrating movement, there’s really nothing to complain about in the visuals department.

So what of the actual plot? Well, Black Lagoon is divided into two 12-episode seasons (the second given the subtitle The Second Barrage), and further subdivided into several arcs each, each of which is usually 3-episodes long, though the one that closes out the show is longer.

The first season is on the whole, the stronger one by a good margin. There’s nothing quite like Dutch and Remy turning a boatful of blowhard Neo-Nazis into a shooting gallery, or Lagoon Company’s encounter with Roberta, who comes in with a briefcase and meido getup full of heavy weaponry to tear Loanapur apart looking for her missing young master.

When in the mode of pure fun, Black Lagoon is a blast. Unfortunately, the show from time to time tries to dip its toes into having a message, and it’s here where Black Lagoon makes its shortcomings known. Much of the discussion on the nature of power and what would drive people to lives of crime in the series is essentially empty philosophizing. At best, it’s a time and interest-killer. At its worst, it comes across as actively patronizing. This reaches its peak with the show’s overall low point, the absolutely miserable “Vampire Twins” arc that makes up the first three episodes of Second Barrage.

The Vampire Twins arc is a culmination of the series’ worst impulses. It mixes a plot device that strains credulity and absolutely annihilates good taste, even for this show. It stars two Romanian twins who have become expert assassins after a life of being forced to murder other children on camera for snuff films, both of whom sometimes “switch” to being the other by passing a wig back and forth. When one dies, the other pulls double duty, until she dies too. Both give the entirety of Roanapur a run for their money, up to and including Hotel Moscow, before they finally take the kids down.

It’s a bizarre combination of cartoonish and relentlessly miserable. The former works for Black Lagoon (again, see the Roberta arc that closes out the first season), but the latter really doesn’t. It can be hard to pinpoint the exact line between gritty and violent media that’s still fun and gritty and violent media that’s just dull, but during this arc, which I must also mention, features Balalaika having to shake down minor character and sex club owner Rowen for literal child pornography so she can figure out who these kids are, that line has well been crossed. The arc’s sole redeeming feature is that it’s the first appearance of “The World of Midnight”, the haunting acapella track that has become Black Lagoon’s aural signature in the years since its premiere.

Sadly, the Vampire Twins arc may well have been something of a portent of what was to come for the seinen action genre, as that level of willful bad taste is now the norm for that sort of manga. It’s hard not to draw at least a small line from this arc to the sheer pointlessness of something like say, Gleipnir, or Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asuka.

Elsewhere in Second Barrage, it’s a more mixed bag. An entertaining arc about a counterfeiter named Jane is a fun throwback to the first season, but it’s over a bit too quickly.

The aforementioned Yakuza arc that closes out the season is interesting in its intricacy, and while its own ruminations on the question of “why do people do bad things?” feel much more earned than those of the Vampire Twins arc, it still fails to make the connections necessary to turn those from merely food for thought into a genuine thematic thesis. It just can’t tie these ideas together well enough, and the overall ending again feels rather grim-for-the-sake-of-it rather than grim-for-a-reason, two categories separated by an admittedly fine line. It’s probably a bit too rude to call Black Lagoon on the whole philosophically empty, but it really comes up short in these areas.

So is Black Lagoon a bad show? Certainly not, while it fails at really digging into the broader psychological issues it tries to, on a purely narrative level it’s endlessly entertaining. It feels a little backhanded to say that a show is “watchable”, since technically anything is watchable, but Black Lagoon has a “can’t put it down” quality that a lot of more thematically engaging anime admittedly don’t have, which prevents me from calling it bad. On the contrary, taken as pure entertainment, it’s actually pretty damn good. There are worse things for an anime to be than that.

If you’re looking to pass a few nights and pop some popcorn and are capable of putting up with its flaws, Black Lagoon is worth a spin. It may not be the classic that it occasionally gets bandied about as, but it’s good, solid, hot-barrelled fun.