It’s time for a really crazy finale to the Trigun adventure. In a way it’s fun to see how things went because you really couldn’t predict what was going to happen next but at the same time it did feel like the show was just running through without a big plan at times. Vash also looks consistently terrible throughout so ultimately the negatives did prevail. This is probably the weakest Trigun season all around even if it does end up having some really excellent fights during the adventure.

A lot of time has passed since the last season and Vash is currently knocked out. (which will be his status for most of the season) Meryl and Millie are driving around doing their reporter jobs when they find out that another colony of humans is approaching the planet. They will help evacuate humanity from this crazy plant world and maybe this will finally end all of the craziness. Unfortunately it won’t be easy as Knives is close to achieving his final form and his minions need more plants to power him up. That means they will be shredding a lot of humans in the process. Vash cannot be depended on so Wolfwood will have to fight them off but each fight accelerates the last of his lifespan so this will not be easy.

It is a bold move to sideline the main character from the final season of his own adventure so I have to give the show some props there. What I can’t give it any credit for is Vash’s absolutely terrible showing throughout though. Vash’s pacifism has consistently been a negative throughout the reboot and he just continues to double down on it here. Forget destroying the mass murderers, Vash won’t even hit them with a flesh wound half the time because it’s too risky and might end up costing their lives. Vash is content to just hesitate in every fight and constantly gets himself captured.

One thing you need to understand here is that these villains are going to be very difficult to take in alive. One of them can use telekinesis to move people and crush their very bones. He is shown to be able to impact an entire tank as well as a large group of people so this power operates at a very high level. No prison can hurt him. Another one is a nearly invulnerable superweapon like Wolfwood, we have Knives who is nearly unstoppable, a music fighter whose audio can destroy you from the inside out, etc.

These guys aren’t bluffing either in case you were hoping that could be a slight cope. Throughout the series they have murdered hundreds of humans. Humanity was already nearly extinct when the series started and that number has been severely reduced. Wolfwood wisely tells Vash that every time he spares these guys, he is causing countless other deaths and is proven right over and over again. Despite that, the show forces Wolfwood to have to try and emulate Vash’s lifestyle by the end which doesn’t make any sense. I much prefer Wolfwood as a full contrast to Vash who is ready to do what needs to be done.

The No Kill rule is a good one for heroes to aspire to but there have to be exceptions depending on the circumstances. The biggest problem with Vash is that he doesn’t believe in having any exceptions at all. He just continues to spare every villain no matter how many lives it causes. The worst part is that he is often the last line of defense for a whole group of powerless humans so letting himself get captured directly causes them all to be doomed. There’s just nothing heroic about Vash and I dare say that he is one of the worst anime protags I’ve seen in quite a while. As the show goes on he just gets worse and worse and worse so maybe it’s for the best that he’s unconscious for most of the season.

Wolfwood is the MVP here because he is the one constantly having to fight for humanity. This often means injecting himself with more juice to keep fighting even though it is destroying his future. Unfortunately he is simply not powerful enough to stop someone like Knives and has a tough time with most of the executives. After a point there is only so much you can do with battle experience when you don’t have the raw stats to get over the hump. His weapon is as cool as ever though.

Ignoring the part where he actually tries to say that Vash has a point, Wolfwood operates as the realist that the series needed. He is there to take care of the villains and protect people as much as he can. It’s often not enough and that’s part of the tragedy for his character but at least he is trying. Without him the show would definitely have lost a whole lot of steam.

Meryl and Milly consistently have a decent role in this one complete with action scenes. They are completely out of their depth in terms of power levels though so they mostly have to rely on the villains going absolutely crazy. Meryl’s a fun character with how proactive she is. Every duo needs at least one tough member and that’s her role. Milly is definitely the contrast here and well I wouldn’t say she’s all that good. Not really my kind of character. For a second there, I thought they show did a twist where she was one of the sentient bugs which would have been really cool but it was just an oddly phrased sentence that was clarified right away.

The Puppetmaster is one of the first villains to make a big move. He’s technically pretty tough but only when all of the conditions are right. If you get past his puppets then the guy is doomed. He mainly lasts in the Vash fight since the hero refuses to hurt anybody. He’s definitely the weakest out of the main villains and I wouldn’t trust him around the base. I dunno it just seems like he was flipped way too easily.

Midvalley is another guy who flips quickly. Sure he was working for Knives out of fear but it doesn’t change the fact that he did go along with the villains. He really tried to destroy Wolfwood during their fight as well. The villains tend to get off way too easily in the show. He did make for a really good fight scene though so I have to give him some props there. I always did think that sound makes for an incredibly deadly weapon since it is so hard to dodge.

Then we have Elendira who spends most of the show in the background. It’s a little too late by the time she is ready to act. Decent powerset but it’s obvious that she is not on the level of the other executives. Vash or Wormwood could take her down with ease but for the most part everyone ignores her so she gets to land a lot of cheap shots. I feel like she mainly exists so that the crazy professor has somebody to talk to back at the base.

Then we have Knives’ most loyal follower: Legato. This guy is completely broken because his telekinesis appears to work at any range and he is also an exceptional close quarters fighter. He seems to be the most powerful fighter in the series because his abilities even work on Vash so they would probably work on Knives as well. It would just be hard for him to land the killing blow so it would be a long drawn out fight. I appreciate that Legato is just super evil. He’s not misunderstood or anything like that.

Legato just really thinks that humanity should be destroyed and every action is towards that goal. The guy is straight forward and sometimes you need a character like that instead of just throwing more ambiguity everywhere. If anything Knives is lucky that Legato was so loyal that he was never thinking straight. Legato just couldn’t believe that Knives had any imperfections and so he wasn’t expecting a cheap shot. Although he didn’t exactly seem broken up about it in the end….

Razlo sort of comes out of nowhere near the end but he does actually have a full character arc and all. He makes for a good opponent and is a solid counterpart to Wolfwood. It all goes a bit fast but on the whole I thought he was a good character. The heroes needed one more fighter with how badly they were outnumbered and he was really useful. It would have been nice if his powerset was a bit more different than Wolfwood’s just so he could stand out more but I was glad at least something good happened for the guy. Most of the show is rather brutal for Wolfwood.

As for Knives, well you could say that he’s the biggest double standard in the show. He wants to destroy humanity for what they are doing to the plants, yet he has to murder tons of plants in order to stay alive. During the first half of the show he doesn’t know this is happening so I can give him a pass on that but then by the end of the show he doesn’t care anymore. He considers this an “ends justify the means” kind of situation and so he keeps on absorbing them in order to get great power. It just makes his whole message hollow.

If you have to destroy all of the planets in order to save them from the humans then your goal doesn’t make sense. The show also has the audacity to try and make him sympathetic by the end which is crazy. Maybe I could take it seriously if he wasn’t having his group torture Vash for months on end and just generally murdering everybody. You have to have some kind of a standard here and this guy was evil through and through. I would have just focused on how crazy he was.

The show has a very interesting concept with the plants being sentient. Imagine if all of a sudden every vegetable was sentient but only 2-5 people in the whole world could hear their voices? Most people probably would just call them crazy and keep on eating vegetables. So for the 5 people I can understand why they would want to amass an army to stop the plants. That’s about where my sympathies with Knives ends. Once Knives begins to “eat” the plants to gain strength then it completely undercuts his arguments.

It also makes Vash look bad as well since he still tries to reason with Knives up through the very end. I can’t help it, the whole show is about bashing Vash so he seems to come up constantly. Vash had multiple chances to end this or at least to put massive holes into Knives’ plan and refuses to do so. Vash is just suicidally empathic the whole time and that’s not a good trait for a character to have. You can understand that the situation absolutely sucks for all parties while still making a move. I forget which character calls Vash a coward to his face about this (Probably Wormwood) but that character was right. It is cowardly to sit back and do nothing because you just don’t know what to do. Particularly in a situation where people are actively being hunted and killed the whole time.

Also while it can be funny in an ironic kind of way, I do think the show has Vash being kidnapped way too often. It just kills the pacing of the series when this same story beat is trotted out over and over. Keep in mind that Knives is unconscious for a lot of the story too so the show just has nowhere to go at times. If you’re going to do that then you need to have a super interesting debate going on and that’s often not the case. I don’t really care about the researchers or the villains talking about the plants all that much. The show just didn’t add enough interesting hooks during the slow moments which also hurt it in the longrun.

The animation is pretty good for a CG title. It does use a whole lot of bright colors so the fights stand out and there is a ton of movement. Trigun definitely pushes the medium pretty hard and so I can definitely recommend those fights quite a lot. The soundtrack isn’t quite as impressive. The opening’s all over the place although I wouldn’t call it bad and the in-show ost is good enough. The animation definitely stands out more than the soundtrack in this case but it works well enough during the battles.

The show can definitely be pretty violent so you’ll want to watch out if you’re expecting a lighter adventure. The scene of Legato throwing a bunch of people into the equivalent of a human blender was particularly disturbing. It’s not like the show is regularly violent but it just has those occasional scenes that really stand out. Vash getting tortured for example isn’t particularly violent so it doesn’t hit as hard even if you can tell that it’s all super painful though.

I will end on a solid note for the season which is that it does have some pretty interesting debates within it. At what point should you be allowed to take a life? Not in self defense, but proactively taking a life in order to help others out. I think it’s really an interesting topic and I like those discussions but Vash basically refuses to consider any argument other than “Never!”. That’s always the worst kind of response to this situation and gives me Attack on Titan flashbacks. At least try and discuss the topic. The villains also make it super easy by giving the ultimate layup situations in front of Vash like actively murdering people right in front of him and Vash is still hesitating the whole time.

There’s one episode near the end where he finally relents and attempts to shoot a villain. It just took the villain ages of choking a character to death and burning countless others before Vash makes a move. So I was glad that Vash made a decision but it should not have taken quite that long. He’s got to be one of the most stubborn characters I’ve ever seen. The show’s apocalyptic atmosphere is also pretty interesting. At times it doesn’t feel like the characters are taking the extinction of the human race for the dire threat that it is, but it makes for a tense backdrop. The heroes are also on the backfoot in this adventure throughout. It’s just not always able to capitalize on this. I also would have liked to have seen the insects do a little more but I get that they didn’t really care who won. Insects will continue to thrive no matter what but they could have been a great wildcard.

Overall, This show was really annoying throughout. The pacing could be really slow at times too. Maybe uneven is the better way to put it. You would go a whole episode of Vash acting crazy while the others walk around, then an episode of nonstop fighting, rinse and repeat. I think there was enough time to cover everything evenly but the episodes had weird priorities at times. I’d say the show has virtually 0 replay value as well. It’s the kind of show where I would definitely Youtube the fights but I wouldn’t want to go through all of the melodrama again. The ending is also deeply unsatisfying. If you’ve made it this far in the Trigun mythos then you should finish it up but don’t expect a great ending here.

Overall 5/10