In its second two, Netflix’s One Piece continues to staunchly refuse to tone down the preposterousness of Oda Eiichiro’s wildly popular pirate manga. That means, yes, that Marine Captain Smoker (Callum Kerr) not only transforms his entire body into a plume of smoke, but also has two cigars in his mouth at the same time. One Piece continues to embrace theatricality and artifice on a grand scale, and it’s even more joyously assured than ever.
The new season picks up with the Straw Hat pirates stopping to resupply at Loguetown before they enter the fearsome waters of the Grand Line. The settlement is one of great historical importance, as it’s where the former pirate king declared that his treasure (and therefore his crown) was up for grabs, prompting countless pirate crews to scour the fantastical seascape. One such aspirant is Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy), who’s oafish and childlike yet so relentlessly determined and kind-hearted that he’s won a small yet loyal group of big dreamers.
It helps, too, that Luffy’s rubber limbs make him a creative and powerful fighter, though he starts to feel the real magnitude of what he’s up against. (How, for one, can rubber fists take down a marine made of smoke?) Furthermore, the Straw Hats have run afoul of a shadowy organization called Baroque Works, whose codenamed agents all have similarly esoteric abilities and report to a smirking, sinister woman named Ms. All-Sunday (Lera Abova).
Still, Luffy isn’t one to let defeat and probable death get him down. One Piece continues to follow an island-hopping structure, with the Straw Hats traveling from one location to the next in a way that evokes the appeal of episodic TV. It’s a veritable onslaught of imagination, each new location reliably providing some of the most bizarre visuals on TV today.
Ms. All-Sunday can make arms sprout from any surface, and her powers aren’t even the strangest sight of the season: There are dinosaurs, giants, and a Wild West town with mountain-sized cacti on the horizon. One wax-spewing Baroque Works assassin (David Dastmalchian) has his hair curled up in the shape of the number three.
Yet even as the oddities multiply, One Piece is admirably committed to practical effects. The series knows that there’s no substitute for hooking a stuntperson to some wires and shooting them through the air, and the proof is best seen in a lively, chaotic fight between Straw Hat swordsman Roronoa Zoro (Mackenyu) and 100 Baroque Works agents across a multi-story saloon. One villain, Wapol (Rob Colletti), has a metal jaw whose movements don’t always sync up perfectly to his dialogue, but the fact that it’s so clearly, tangibly there on the actor’s face gives the scene a tactile charm. In short, One Piece remains a bottomless fount of imagination.
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