Review of Black Lagoon

This will be a review of all three parts of the series for simplicity's sake. Video review here: https://youtu.be/DS0V83HPIu4 Black Lagoon first saw the light of day as a manga released in 2002. The series went on hiatus in 2010, but was brought back in spring of this year, so what better time to do a retroactive three-part review, amirite? The anime debuted in the spring season of 2006 and the story starts off with our “main” character, a painfully bland salaryman named Rokuro Okajima, referred to simply as “Rock” for the duration of the show’s run, being abducted while on a business trip by the LagoonCompany, a group of mercenary pirates operating the South Pacific. When Rock’s corporate office finds out about this, they leave him for dead and he takes the opportunity to chunk his old life and throw in with the Lagoon Company in possibly the cuckiest, passive aggressive way possible. Wizz-bang-shooty-fun ensues.

The Lagoon Company consists of Revy, the hot headed Chinese-American gun slinger, Dutch, the cool, calm, and collected African-American Vietnam veteran who acts as the CEO of the outfit, Benny, a Jewish American from Florida who is essentially the brains of the operation and seems eerily at-peace with all carnage and killing going on all the time, and the ever trusty Black Lagoon the team’s World War 2 era torpedo boat that is not only their home-away-from home, but their biggest weapon and asset. With so many Americans in the cast it should come as no surprise that there is indeed a dub and it is superb, being one of only half a dozen dubs that I think you’re missing out if you never get around to hearing them. (Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Dragonball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, Black Lagoon, and Samurai Champloo).

The Lagoon Company operates as a sort dysfunctional family; in particular Rock and Revy are constantly at one another’s throats as Revy is charged by Dutch to protect Rock and make sure he doesn’t stumble into any trouble, which is easy to do in their home base in the lawless city of Roanapur. Although you see this adversarial relationship between the four slowly growing on all of them. They’re all assholse to one another, but they all seem to think deep down yeah but they’re my group of assholes. This show is really good at making you fall for characters that are by all measures total dicks.

And while I’m in the process of mentioning the location from which most of the events unfold from, I’d like to say this: The strongest character in the entire show is the city of Roanapur itself. You get a great sense of personality right as soon as you see the place. Rocka and the others are driving across the bridge into the city in Benny’s pink Pontiac GTO and you just see old nooses littering the bridge; like someone hung a bunch of people there at one point and took the bodies down but didn’t bothered to remove the nooses themselves. That’s Roanapur: a city aware enough to remove the corpses from the streets, but not acclimated enough to normalcy to think to sweep up the bullet casings as well.

The first season of Black Lagoon introduces a litany of important and colorful side-characters, and their motivations over a well paced amount of time, but it’s lacking in depth. You don’t seem to get a strong sense of each character’s place in the world or how they view themselves at least not in this first season anyway. However, in the Eagle Hunting arc (Episodes 4-6) you do get this really deep introspective monologue by Revy while she and Rock are picking through a sunken Nazi sub, as well as another great piece of prose in a flashback where the original Kriegsmarine officer questions the whole point of the war with a radical SS officer. These two moments were possibly the strongest of the entire first season, and there’s even more moments like this in the Second Barrage and Roberta’s Blood Trail, but that’s not what most people praise the show for.

Most people seem to ignore this philosophical and existential aspect of the show in favor of all the shooty-fun-stuff and the gun porn, and don’t get me wrong, there’s good reason too; it’s all top notch, but to see this show often written off as the aforementioned “Wizz-bang-shooty-fun” is doing it a massive disservice.

The first season starts to wind down with the Maid to Kill arc, and in this one you may need to brush up on your geo-politics a bit; we start getting into South American politics, the many drug wars going on there and even the communist group FARC get’s involved. Now me, I fucking love geo-politics, I keep up with it and know all the history, but the show has a tendency to exposition dump a history lesson every once in a while to set up the back story for a new arc. This can turn some people off, but its right up my alley and I can’t get enough of it.

In the Second Barrage, all the aforementioned shortcomings of Black Lagoon melt away and you get a lot of background into the different factions as well as a strong opening arc with the vampire twins and the Russian crime syndicate Hotel Moskow. This where this show gets really dark in some places and it’s far from the last time you’ll get a taste of it in the series. There’s some episodic mid-season fuckery going on after that but once we hit the Fujiyama Gansta Paradise arc, we’re not hitting the ground at any point afterwards. At this point we start to see Rock go down a disturbing path were he doesn’t seem to be trying to fix these problems he sees in the events unfolding before them, but just trying to exert some kind of control over them; almost like he just wants the power to manipulate things to his will. And this reaches its logical extreme when we set out on our third and final leg of this triple play: The five-part OVA series Roberta’s Blood Trail.

The family from the Maid to Kill arc is back and things have gone tits-up back home in Columbia. Vowing revenge for her master’s death, Roberta’s on a full-blown suicide mission to take down the elite CIA team that murdered her master. Hotel Moskow gets involved trying to settle a decade old grudge against the United States, Chang and the Triad try to settle everything down, and all while our once quiet bashful Rock seeks to manipulate every single event from the shadows and play each side off the other. This is beyond a shadow of a doubt the strongest of the three sections of Black Lagoon and it’s likely because it focuses on just one arc. There’s no bullshit. No filler. Just an intricately detailed story with interesting characters all with their own conflicting emotions and motivations. If this arc doesn’t strike you with at least something then I think it’s safe to say that you just don’t have a pulse.

Ultimately, about Black Lagoon as a whole I would have to say everyone needs to give it a shot. Yeah, it’s kind of niche with its crime/drama action-oriented story, filthy language, gun porn, and dark ominous existentialist philosophy flying around, but it has so many different facets to it that I think most viewers will find something here that they like or outright love. I might even go so far as to call it a cult classic and with the manga now ongoing again, hopefully we haven’t seen the last of this brilliant series that holds nothing back.