EPISODE 7: BDN

    To be quite honest, I liked Vash's role in this episode, but Brilliant Dynamite Neon scared me. Badly. Kaite was a little creepy too, but mostly it was all Neon. From his cigarette to his gun to his clothes, the man just frightened me. This was a cliffhanger episode, and thankfully I got into the series just after the third volume came out, so I only had to run down to the store to find the resolution to the story ^_^; As always, your summary.
    When it starts, the townspeople are having a party for Vash after he provided the money to save their town. After a drinking contest, men coming on to Meryl, finding out Milly can't hold her liquor, and Vash's willful turndown of prostitutes (that REALLY says something...), it's morning. We see Milly and Meryl frantically packing to catch Vash as he leaves on the giant sandsteamer that entered town in the last episode. Unfortunately, they don't have enough money to go, and they don't have enough time to catch it. As the steamer pulls away, Vash waves goodbye to the kiddies running after it. The kids drop out of site, at which point he praises his freedom, then promptly vomits over the side of the steamer. While he's trying to rest in an inside corridor, a man comes and asks him to be on the security staff since they're entering the territory of a ruthless criminal group known as the Badlads. Vash declines, saying he's only a simple passenger and that they should be keeping him safe. He goes to the bathroom, but as he leaves, he gets smacked in the face by a little stowaway boy who tries to run away. Vash stops him by bursting his head through the overhead vent and dragging the kid back into the room. After copious struggles, the kid drops to the ground and tells Vash a story about abuse to make him feel sorry for the little snot. We come to find out that this little kid's name is Kaite, and if you were watching carefully, he was in the episode before this one asking if the engineers needed any help. Vash, feeling sorry for Kaite, accepts the security job he'd been offered so that Kaite could stay in his room. When Vash goes down to get food, he finds that the insurance girls have gotten jobs on the ship and are still in fact following him. After he buys large quantities of food, Milly comments that he has an appetite like a growing boy. He laughs it off, then while walking away comments on how sharp the girls are, especially Milly. When he goes to the room and tries to give a sandwich to Kaite, Kaite knocks him over and steals _all_ the food in the bag. After Vash feeds him and everything, Kaite drugs him and runs up and starts waving a signal, saying something about everything being in place. Apparently, he's signalling the Badlads, and we get our first glimpse of Brilliant Dynamites Neon, their leader. The Badlads all ride up to the steamer and quickly roundup all the passengers and crew, wasting no time in collecting the valuables. When BDN finds out that the real jewels and stuff are in a huge safe that noone can open, he takes control of the ship and tells the captain that they're gonna drive the steamer to the Inora Precipice to crack the thing open to get the contents of the safe. Somewhere in that sequence, Milly and Meryl beat up a couple of Badlad flunkies to take their suits, and Vash wakes up from the first Rem hallucination we get to see, at which points he notices something screwy going on and crawls through the vents to find the problem. Our friend Kaite comes back to the cockpit to find out if BDN had everything he needed, and when Neon told him they were gonna crack the ship in half, Kaite objected to the point of getting beat up, teeth knocked out, etc. Just as BDN's about to blow his brains out, Vash intervenes by hanging outside one of the windows and shooting it out. After some gunplay and distractions, Vash jumps out the same window with Kaite while trying to avoid BDN's gunfire. The episode ends with Vash and Kaite hanging on for dear life on the outside bottom of the ship inches from the ground and Neon laughing hysterically, the conclusion coming on the first episode of the third volume, the volume being Wolfwood and the episode being "And Between the Wasteland and Sky..."
    Yay! Action-packed, much more so than the last one. Several things to address this time around, the first of which is Vash's drunkenness... again. Up to that point (and right up to episode 19 for now *_*), that is the largest amount of booze I've seen ANYONE down at one time in the series. But it's justified since they're all throwing him a party and stuff, and they bet him he couldn't. He seemed to be pretty plastered at the party, and in fact afterwards we see prostitutes leaving his room saying that it's too bad he's out cold. After they leave, we see him open his eyes, the roll over on his back and say "Couldn't I be regretting it? Just a little?" This is my next point, and yet another "Vash is a super guy" point: The entire show up to this point has largely consisted of him chasing pretty girls around, asking them to marry him, peeking in their windows, etc. You'd think the prostitutes would be right up his alley, but no... he won't take advantage of girls like that apparently. So although his lecherous ways seem a little questionable at first, when it comes right down to it, he won't take advantage. What a cool guy ^_^ Ok... let's see... He turned down the security job when they offered it to him, which means that he was either a bit to hung over to think he could do a good job with it, or thought the ship's defenses should already be sufficient enough to keep them out, considering they probably pass through that area a lot and would already have needed to guard against their attacks. Either way, he was keeping his reputation out of the spotlight and let other people do their job. Granted he stepped in when necessary, but I don't like doing other people's jobs either, even if I know I could do it better. He does eventually take the job though, simply to get a room for Kaite. If that doesn't say how much of a bleeding heart he is around children, I don't know what does. The kid whacked him in the face, stole his food, and drugged him, not to mentioned throwing some insults in there, I believe, and yet Vash still protects him and rescues him from splatter time from BDN. Next point: BDN. FREAK. Moving on, Vash kinda admitted that he had a lot of respect (indirectly anyway) for the insurance girls, especially Milly. If they could figure out a way to do their job of following him without any money and without him knowing up to that point, and on top of that Milly pinpointed the little boy appetite, despite the fact that she thought it was his. So this leads him to admit that "Those girls are pretty sharp... the big one is especially scary." So yea, I think Vash has a lot of respect for the girls, hinted at strongly by this scene and several other places throughout the series. Ok, the last thing I'll talk about is the slight interaction between BDN and Vash. I was gonna do that when I first brought up Neon, but I just can't bring myself to talk about him -_-; Ok, here goes. Neon seemed to be a very arrogant jerk, only wanting the jewels, not letting any of the passengers stand in his way, getting rid of all the opposition like the pilot, the attempt at Kaite, and the sandsteamer itself when it came between him and the valuables in the safe. But when Vash showed up, he made some vague remark about things getting interesting and sent the Badlads after him to fetch him a prize, and to make it beautiful and flashy o_O; This hints at a little respect Neon had for Vash even at the early stages of the arc, a fact that's only proven much more effectively in the later episode. But I'll talk more about that in the next one. I've run out of things to say about this episode, sorry this one's so short.

To recap, Vash is still a drunkard, won't take advantage of women even though he makes you think he would, still has a soft spot for kids, and has a certain amount of admiration for the Insurance girls. You'd think there'd be a lot more to this one since it took me so long to do, but I'm sorry... I'll try harder on another episode ^_^;