EPISODE 8: And Between the Wasteland and Sky...

    Here is the second half of the first cliffhanger of the series, with more hijinks from Brilliant Dynamite Neon and the Badlads. For the first time, someone questions Vash's identity, and for the first time he declines to answer. We also see that Vash IS able to get shot. Here we go...
    This summary shouldn't be too bad since I watched this episode a few days ago. Ok, the first scene with Vash is him hiding in the vents with Kaite while the Badlads scatter and look for him. Kaite asks Vash why he even bothered to save him, at which point Vash goes SD and yells at him. When Kaite asks where they're going, Vash says it's not the time to think about things like that, just to stay alive. This thoroughly confuses poor, creepy Kaite. Kaite eventually shows Vash a detailed diagram of the blueprints to the sandsteamer. When Kaite has a flashback to his parents and begins to cry, Vash proceeds to beat him on the head. They proceed to work their way through the halls of badlads, one stunt was to roll a cart of what appeared to be tanks up to a trio of them, fire a shot, and mysteriously have nothing happen. The badlads stood there asking themselves why it didn't explode, then Vash flew out of nowhere and subdued them. He was rather happy to have their guns to play with ^_^ He and Kaite make it to a room with message tubes that go throughout the ship, and Vash pulls the wool over BDN's eyes when he pretends to be a Badlad being beaten by the blonde guy. At one point during this frenzy, a badlad wanders back up to BDN saying that "that guy's not human," and falling over to reveal a piece of notebook paper that had a smiley Vash with the words "so funny!" below it. This delights Brilliant Dynamites Neon. He yells through the message tubes for all the badlads to be on the alert for the blonde guy. This delights Vash, who gives Kaite a pen communicator that Kaite talked into and it broadcasted into Vash's earring, and then he prepares to leave. Kaite gets angry at this and asks where he got such lost technology and who exactly Vash was, at which point Vash turns and replies that he'd tell Kaite, but he wouldn't believe him. Vash strolls out into the hallway, but six shots are quickly fired, and when Kaite checks to see if everything's all right, he finds Vash bent over a few badlads, saying he missed his mark, they were bleeding too badly, and that he needed to help them. Kaite gets furious, saying that no matter how good a shot you are, unless you shoot to kill you're gonna get killed yourself. Vash agrees, but tells Kaite he made a promise, and if he put out even one flame of life, it would make "her" sad. Kaite is mystified by the "her", but when he sees Vash is also shot and hurting bad, he goes back to directing from the tube room while Vash goes around and beats the badlads. BDN eventually finds out what's happening, and they manage to fool Kaite and get Vash caught in a room with BDN and a whole host of badlads. The badlads fire machine guns at him, but they all miss and it forms a perfect silhouette behind him with bullet holes in the wall. BDN comments that Vash sparkles impressively (o_O;), but it was time for him to die. Luckily, at this point Milly and Meryl show up as undercover Badlads and corner BDN, then address their "blonde guy" as Vash the Stampede and ask him to kindly finish them off with minimal fuss. When BDN finds out that this "blonde guy" is Vash the Stampede, he asks Vash for an old-fashioned duel. They meet outside on the ship's deck, and BDN throws a coin to signal when to start the duel. When the coin hits the deck, the ship runs into the side of a canyon so that rock debris is everywhere. BDN begins to fire vigorously into the spot where Vash was standing with these two giant surprise machine guns perched on his shoulder, but Vash has jumped behind one of the rocks flying around in the air, and he fires six shots at BDN, disabling his machine guns. Vash collapses on the deck in a puddle of blood. BDN pulls out his gun and aims at Vash as if to finish him off, but he's actually protecting him from a boulder that almost falls on him. When questioned by the badlads as to why he didn't finish Vash off, BDN simply states that a name defended to the death is a name worthy of respect. The badlads and BDN leave and the engineer happily engages the emergency brakes, but they do not work. There's a big scene with Kaite trying to help and being rejected by the engineers, he gets egged on by Vash to do the right thing, flashback to Vash telling him the ticket to the future is always open, he gets badly burned but engages the emergency shutoff yadda yadda yadda... BDN ends up stopping the sandsteamer from just barely going over the edge of the canyon, and it ends with Kaite and Vash up on the top of the sandsteamer, Kaite singing Sound Life and Vash thinking of Rem and begging Kaite to stop.
    Ok, four things in this episode. We hear Rem's philosophies spoken by Vash as a direct quote for the first time, Vash does some massive gunplay with large groups of people that takes our respect for him to another level, Kaite, although an inherently creepy kid, is still a kid and treated as such by Vash, and we see that Vash is apparently capable of making a mistake and being shot. Ok, first off, Rem. Rem is my favorite person in the series other than Vash, so you have to hear me talk about her for awhile. We see her for the first time last episode, in one of Vash's hallucinations, but alas, it's just her back. In this episode, that's all we get too. However, for other Rem goodies, we have one of her philosophies directly quoted by Vash. "The ticket to the future is always open" is what he tells Kaite when Kaite says they've all let innocent people die and are all sinners. He doesn't say it's Rem, but trust me, that is one of Rem's patented primary philosophies. He is also following Rem's word when he stops and helps the badlads whom he's shot. He says he made a promise and that if he let those badlads die, it would make "her" sad. We learn later (or we could infer from previous episodes) that the "her" is Rem, and he's following another one of her patented primary philosophies, that everyone deserves the right to live. He doesn't say this out loud, though. This is direct proof that Rem DID shape who Vash is today, in case we needed any more. More Rem-ness includes the first appearance of Sound Life, as sung by first Kaite and then by Rem herself. Yay for Sound Life! The fact that Vash started crying when Kaite began to sing Sound Life is another sign, one of the first emotional rather than example (meaning doing something that Rem believed in) displays that Vash has for Rem. Ok, the next major point in the episode is the gunplay. Yet again, Vash really struts his stuff as the best gunman anyone's ever seen, and this time he takes it to a new level by going head-on against many formidable, armed opponents that do wish to kill him, a bit more hostile than the mob that was chasing him in the sixth episode. He jumps out of nowhere, shoots so nobody dies, and mainly aims to make fools out of the badlads. His fighting skills go to yet another level when he begins to do the exact shooting, flying out of nowhere in odd places, and hiding strategically when he's been shot in the side and is in an obvious bit of pain. This is the next point, the fact that Vash got shot. This illustrates that Vash is not an infallible being as we had been lead to believe. Up to this point, Vash does not make any mistakes and can do no wrong. But when he makes the mistake of walking out into the hall with his guard down and gets shot, we see he is not perfect and is in fact at this point human. This is further proven when he misses his mark firing at the badlads and almost kills them. Those guys should be greatful to our Vash for saving their lives ^_^ Then there's Kaite. I already said in the last episode that Vash forgave the kid against all odds for betraying everyone and getting the ship in all this trouble, but in this episode, Vash continues to trust him by not believing that Kaite had simply turned him over to the badlads, and also when he instructed Kaite to save the ship and knew Kaite would pull it off. Vash would probably be like this to any person in Kaite's situation, but it helps the perspective that Vash is fond of little kids as well. His fondness for little kids is shown again when he and Kaite bicker on the roof of the ship at the end with Sound Life in the background. That was extremely cute ^_^ One final point: BDN. Still a FREAK. Ok, that's it for analysis.

A really cool way to end the cliffhanger, and actually the only one in the series unless you count the one with Monev the Gale in it, but that wasn't really a two-parter since the 13th episode was just showing Monev beg for his life and the rest was clips of the first half of the series... but I digress. Kaite is still creepy, BDN's still a freak, and we all love to hear Sound Life. That's it for number 8, see you at 9 with Wolfwood.