Dragon's Dogma Netflix Episode 4: Sloth

 Ah! Where gone those days,

Coming back to Dragon's Dogma Netflix edition is a lot more appealing now that we've put the goblin episode behind us, although as we move into the final handful of episodes the question really is whether or not the show will focus up and get to start making it's ultimate points. And to that end I think that yes, the show has begun to tickle the prospect off paying off those set-ups, albeit with about two or three episodes left to go. Heck, maybe by the end of this there'll actually be a fully competent reason why the episodes are themed after the seven deadly sins, because so far it's feeling a little arbitrary. If I didn't already know that Capcom and Dragon's Dogma's creator hadn't gotten themselves involved with the project I might have accused the anime makers of not having actually experienced the game themselves just for employing such a core central thematic device. But I'm no bore, I'll give them the chance to win me over. (Spoilers, by the way.)

This episode is entitled 'Sloth', one of my favourite of the deadly sins to see represented due to the not-exactly obvious nature of the sin leading to quite some diversity in the ways we can see some one can depict the idea of slothfulness. It's like the old-ball sin next to the odd-ball Horseman of the Apocalypse 'Pestilence'. And how do they represent it in this series? With drugs. Yeah, this is the drug episode everybody! The anime uses psychedelic moss and the stupor it sends it's users on as a metaphor for disassociation and ignoring one's problems, which is totally valid on it's face even if it's simultaneously a bit shallow. Were this a greater length series which was taking a greater look at the concept of 'Sloth', rather than 20 minutes of an anime episode, I might chide this display as situationally reductive; but the episode doesn't linger on the topic too much, so the drug-addiction short-hand works well enough.

As I mentioned before, in the show's attempt to be subversive and therefore unpredictable with it's hard view on morality and karmic retribution, the show does wobble close to predictability for the mere fact that you know something untoward is going to happen to otherwise underserving people. Last episode it was the twist double homicide at the end, this time it was Lennie, wife of the drugged out adulterer, being munched on by a Hydra, if anything the only part of this episode that did honestly surprise me was the fact that Lennie actually survived inside the beast's belly! Although she did lose her eyesight. (There's the typical fatalism I was missing for a scant second! I almost had a hope for a second! Perish the thought.) Aside from that the raw body of the episode was fairly generic to the series' own standards and that would typically dampen the amount of enjoyment I could see out of it, and yet I did end up liking this episode more than the last one.

Part of that comes down to the beast of this episode, the aforementioned Hydra. The fight against this beast is straightforward in choreography, but stands out for the talent of the animation. I've said it before, but in action this show visually sings and that has proven no less true against a beast as large and somewhat iconic as this one, (It's the first proper monster you fight in the game, so I'd call that pretty iconic) if only the action writing and combat staging could match that level of quality then this show could be an excellent action anime. For example, the show remembers enough lore to show us the 'Hydra heads regenerate' thing play out, very cool, but then they totally neglect the whole 'unless you set the wound on fire' caveat which the game touts. It would have fit into the narrative neatly too, as Olivia seem to do nothing else but shoot fire magic about the place, but they wanted a wholly more contrived finale to the encounter which, though narratively significant, kind of diminished the sort of tangible deathly threat that a Hydra should pose. (His Berserker rage could have made him more clever in order to solve the fight, rather than just '/kill' it.)

It was the glimmer of character work being introduced to our character which made this episode really stand out for me for it's decent set-up and execution. Already we'd had it established that our view-finder, Ethan, is something of a typically heroic protagonist, driven to try and solve every problem he comes across and to see the strength in the belittled man. Each episode has shown Ethan be punished for his naiveté, where the people he sought to help end up worse than before or the 'little man' brings about their own destruction. This is the episode where those lessons actually start to take hold, and we're lucky enough to see the shift happen real time over the course of this episode alone. And it's actually this sort of 'answer-response' writing which I think can be the most effective when displaying a journey of character growth, so I definitely appreciated seeing it here.

At the start of his journey to slay the Hydra, Ethan and his pawn Olivia discuss the futility of Lennie' struggles in her hoping that her drug addled husband will magically snap back to normal once the dragon had been slain and structure was restored. Ethan is his typical optimistic self whilst Olivia is stoic on the matter, rather unable to connect to the humanity of the situation. (Being a pawn and all.) After the events of the episode however, with Lennie being briefly vored and the mine camp being all-but destroyed, Ethan and Olivia walk the exact same stretch of land and have an almost identical conversation only with their perspectives utterly reversed. Of course, the key switching moment was when Ethan thought he'd lost Olivia, before learning that Pawns don't die like humans do, and went all red-eye berserk for a time. And I like the interesting implications this opens up for where this series is going.

We know that part of the journey of a Pawn is to attach to it's arisen and leech of their personality and knowledge to eventually morph into a copy of them once their arisen ascends to either Seneschal-hood or Dragon-hood, so seeing Olivia start to cotton onto the 'wonders' of the human spirit is fully in-keeping with that journey. Ethan losing his faith in humanity, however, to the point where he even refers to 'humans' as separate from himself, is atypical to the Arisen destiny. Perhaps we could see this as a consequence of being separated from his heart, but only if we accept the classical biological mythology that the heart is the font of emotion and humanity, and despite seeming to a standard medieval fantasy world in appearance I've never felt that particular concept as being present in the Dragon's Dogma setting before. What's more likely is that we're seeing the slow descent of Ethan, through grounded human stumbling, into the state of a Dark Arisen, perhaps the most fascinating current chunk of Dogma lore which was only ever touched on by the game's first and last DLC.

What on it's face is a rather standard episode of Dragon's Dogma, shapes up as the beginning of the fulfilment of this series' purpose, and that alone made it a more interesting episode for me. I still lament the action and wish a bit more structure could be introduced to how the fights play out, but the visuals are robust enough to keep my attention as it is. (I just think there could be a lot more to it.) I wasn't a fan of the individual story of this episode, doing a 'drugs = laziness' plot feels dangerously close to a cop-out and it's only the wider narrative of the series that saved it, but only just. Ultimately, I think this was a  decidedly average episode of the show with the hope of something more. But I'm going to knock down a mark for the resolution of the action, which was just lazy, so it's a flat C Grade. I have faith that things are going to start getting more interesting from here...