#I'll never spell kaiba correctly

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh Ep8 S1: Pharaoh’s Nietzsche Problems

I figured this would be a good show to recap since it’s got maybe about 5 minutes of content an episode...usually. But, the thing about Yugioh is that when it needs to move plot, it really moves a lot of plot. Quite a bit happens this episode, it’s a long recap, so lets just get to it. Starting with Keiba’s brother, Mokuba.

And no, we haven’t missed anything--he’s just secretly been here the entire time.

What’s kind of neat about Pegasus’ help is that they are reoccurring characters. This guy with the mustache. The one with the double spike mullet. They are very flat characters, but their presence asks a lot of questions. In this case it’s “do you really want to befriend Mokuba or something? What’s with this silver platter service? Do you guys all hang out? Do you all go to the beach together in your time off and like read magazines with your sunglasses on?”

And back in the largest drawing room and all of it’s slight perspective errors that are off just enough to cause me great pain, Pegasus is enjoying his weird ass cheese meal.

When informed that his victim has escaped, he’s not exactly concerned. He’s got cameras all over the island. Also, it’s an ISLAND with only one boat to stow away on and it is nicely guarded. So he figures he should check out how the duels are going with the island computer system. Because ya, of course there’s a camera every five feet on this deserted island. This guy is about one step removed from a Bond Villain.

Speaking of, Yugi is back to walking aimlessly around the forest with his buddies, just biding his time and blissfully unaware of the karmic retribution soon coming to him because of something his other half did.

And they run into my brother’s favorite character, double spike mullet man. He’s got a name but for the life of me I will never remember. His weird thing is that he can’t hold someone a normal way. He usually holds them like teddy bears.

Tristan finally demonstrates why he’s a member of the crew and it really threw me for a loop. Tristan has bizzare gorilla strength--but only occasionally. And predictably he gets soundly kicked by this very nimble double-spiked mullet man, who might be legit invincible.

And because the Yugi crew can’t not, they decide to take heart and do some justice, like they always do. This episode is like a big caveat for “always do the right thing, though sometimes the right thing would be to leave it alone because you aren’t as good or smart as you think you are, and you might only make things worse with your ineptitude.”

So, they decide to use the best strategy they could think of in order to catch the chip-napper, which was to just kinda...wait around or something. Turns out they aren’t very smart, which I’m really starting to think may not be entirely their fault since Yugi has only half a brain (though I’m starting to think it’s more a 20-80 Yugi-Pharaoh mix) and the rest are constantly exposed to Pharaoh psychic powers, which must be confusing. They actually do talk--in great detail--about how dumb Joey Wheeler is through the length of this episode, I just didn’t cap it.

Luckily, Mokuba wasn’t exactly hiding so we very quickly cut to the chase, although it appears Yugi doesn’t really get who this, he’s just got a card addiction and sees dueling as a great way to solve Nearly Any Problem. Including how to deal with theft.

Ah Joey, the Cassandra who called it first at the haunted Pharaoh necklace Maybe Possessing His Best Friend’s Mind.

Surprisingly, Seto Keiba’s awake. I just assumed he was in a hospital bed these past 7 episodes. But, apparently he’s walking around...sort of. He got a heavy dose of depression symptoms from the mind-wipe, and that’s not the sort of thing that this show tries to hide.

A lot of kid shows try to tread on this territory. But, this is the only one I’ve seen that goes HARD into mental illness without watering it down into some sort of cute metaphor like Elsa and her ice magic. Kieba doesn’t know how to Keiba anymore. He doesn’t want to do what he used to do. He doesn’t want to be who he used to be. He lost the thing that gave him passion and he’s PISSED.

And because it’s Yugioh, it’s gotta get Pretty Dark For A Kids Show, and so Keiba walks out of their life and puts all of his very real adult responsibilities on his very little brother who does not understand why.

While this is actually a pretty accurate portrayal of what depression can do to a family, I just wanna note that they chose to go this route. Usually in a kids show, when a character is “cured” of evil, it’s replaced with something else. Usually, it’s replaced with the goodness that character already had, deep down inside. Maybe a goodness they had as a child. In the case of Keiba...he apparently didn’t have that goodness to begin with.

Parts of Keiba are just GONE and Pharaohs take is “I fixed him, so you should be happy now.” Like, I have no idea if this show supports Pharaoh or actually wants to portray this as a character flaw, but I assume we’ll find out more later.

Also, remember how I said that Pegasus was once removed from a Bond Villian? Well, he crossed the one degree in a foot-note flashback.

I had to rewind when I watched this because this whole thing about “I’ll just kidnap him and run the company that way” was so...illegal? Even for a kid’s show it’s so roundabout. I mean we’re dealing with a Psychic so why not just mind control one of the Kiebas? O well. And then there’s the other thing--because Yugi embarrassed Keiba Corp by beating Seto, Pegasus has to prove he’s a better card player in order to seal this shady business deal.  For...some reason?

Meanwhile, Pharaoh turns himself into a Philosophy 101 major’s first thesis about Nietzsche, as he makes himself the sole definer of what is good and evil and basically ignores what anyone lesser than him might say on the subject because he is Pharaoh and Pharaohs are Right.

Does he care about what he did to Mokuba and his family? Maybe later, but he certainly didn’t really care this episode. He just seems annoyed that other people aren’t like gun-ho about his “just wipe em clean” theory when it’s like, dude, does the medicine really outweigh the cure here? You gave the guy depression.

And although the show keeps saying Keiba was evil--we didn’t see much evidence of that because this all went down in Episode 1. Maybe that’s a lot of my problem in getting to like Pharaoh. I just gotta trust him that Keiba’s evil, but the worst thing I saw him do was tear up a card that Grandpa’s heart was connected to. Keiba still doesn’t even believe in that folktale heart of the cards stuff so should he be judged on that?

This blog just came off of occasionally recapping Once Upon a Time, which is obsessed with “where does good/evil come from?” and so to see this same trope of “We’ll just remove everything evil and it’s fixed!” explored again in another show--I dunno, we’ll see if Yugioh can do a better job. The bar is set pretty low because Once totally botched this.

My opinion: this mind-wipe seems pretty temporary since it’s not like Keiba chose to get it done, but we’ll see how it goes.

I was honestly surprised to see a show like this actually deliver a good take on the Sailor Moon Moral Savior trope, where she waves her moon healing wand, and evil characters are just “good” in the flash of an eye and all problems are solved and she is heralded as this wonderful savior.

Like seriously last episode was about stabbing the moon with a stone robot, how did we get here from that?

Meanwhile, back on the island, They’ve decided to do the right thing and it’s screwed them yet again because sometimes the only way to truly fix something when you screw up, is to just never have done it. Sometimes we do bad things thinking that if we get caught we can just fix it later--but there’s a lot of things that aren’t fixable. Sometimes people won’t be available to say sorry to. Sometimes you can’t return what you’ve taken, let it be star chips, time away from your little brother, or actual pieces of someone’s soul. Sometimes you just have to live with that.

Just a quick reminder that last episode revolved around eating fish for lunch.

Mokuba has such a strong neck now because of all these weird arm grabs. Also, I just realized Double Spike Mullet Man also has Big O type eyebrows and it’s something.

speaking of freaking too late

I mean I’m not even going to pretend that’s the real Keiba because youknow it’s a dark show but it hasn’t gone that dark. With the exception of our main character who IS half a zombie but man it’s always nice to see Pharaoh get a good ol slap in the face when he’s on his insufferable God kick.

Anyway, next week we duel a zombie and also find out how this is even possible. I admit I did not see the zombie twist coming that was...I feel like I use the word “unexpected” in every recap but here we are.