Bleach – episode 58

November 21, 2005 on 2:34 pm | In Bleach | Comments Off on Bleach – episode 58

There’s something about Bleach that angers me: Ichigo deliberately allows himself to get stabbed near to death just so that he can say “Fooled you: I’ve actually got this mega awesome attack”.

This episode’s like that, plus it has bureaucracy and boobs.

The fight between Byakuya and Ichigo continues, and Ichigo continues to taunt Byakuya to bring out his ban kai. If Byakuya could always have used his ban kai, and it is so much more powerful than Ichigo’s shi kai, he really should have. But don’t ask me.

Anyway, this culminates in Ichigo releasing his own ban kai. Meanwhile, Hitsugaya and Matsumoto try to talk to the Soul Society higher ups about the situation and are met with stone cold silence. Their scenes will probably serve some purpose later but are just in this episode for time.

I will make an admission and concede that Ichigo’s ban kai is damned cool, and much more practical than just about every other ban kai; some of the ban kai we’ve seen over the course of the series have been either damned ugly, unwieldy or both. To see Ichigo essentially become a streamlined version of himself was enjoyable.

However, this episode cuts to other character sets unnecessarily: the Ishida, Orihime and Chad scenes were largely unnecessary, serving only to put them in place to climb a mountain. The three of them are really getting off easy in Soul Society; sometimes I wonder why they even bothered to come.

Still, the fight is focussed for the most part, and that is always welcome. The only issue is that to maintain “interest”, Ichigo and Byakuya have to keep getting the upper hand. To do so, they perfect the incredibly misleading aforementioned “you think you killed me – heck, I’m suffering mortal wounds here! – but you didn’t” techniques. It’s just … not cool. One should avoid all stabs.

This fight needs to continue, but by the time it concludes the fight between Yamamoto, Kyouraku and Ukitake will have been rendered irrelevant. Bleach‘s fight for balance will surely never be won.

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