All Evil Dreams and Angry Words is the sixth episode of the first season of the Netflix adult animated action Blue Eye Samurai.
Synopsis[]
Determined to see Fowler dead, Mizu scrapes up all the wits, grit and strength she has left to make her way through his castle's defenses.
Plot[]
Mizu reaches Tanabe Island
Entering the tunnel
In " All Evil Dreams and Angry Words", Mizu arrives across the bay from Tanabe Island at night. She attempts to meditate, reciting a Buddhist sutra, but her thoughts are clouded by memories of various people- including Mikio, Taigen, Ringo, Akemi and her 'mother'- so she gathers her equipment. Following Kaji's directions, she locates the trapdoor and opens it, revealing a tunnel leading under the water to Fowler's castle. Entering, she lights a torch and follows it, unperturbed by the many rats around her. As she continues, however, she begins to notice many skeletons lining the tunnel's floor and walls- most of them women and young children. The sheer number of dead unnerves her, and she rushes past them to a locked door at the end of the passage.
Mizu attempts to open the door with her lockpicks, and initially thinks she has done so. However, she actually sets off a chain-and-wight mechanism that opens the tunnel behind her to the sea. This causes a flood of icy seawater to rush into the tunnel, extinguishing her torch and completely submerging her. Managing to swim back and open the actual lock despite the darkness, Mizu opens the door and swims up the passage to the surface as quickly as she can, emerging under a grate in a storage room. However, she is forced to abandon almost all her equipment apart from a garrote, two hand grenades, and her sword (still in its' naginata form).
Stealing into the next room, she finds a large two-leveled cellar patrolled by two samurai guards. Keeping to the shadows, she weaves between the pillars until she is near the one on the lower level. He notices the puddles of water she leaves behind the pillar and comes to investigate, only for Mizu to ambush him from behind and garrotte him silently. However, as he dies, his naginata clangs on the floor, alerting the other guard. Before he can sound the alarm bell, Mizu hurls her naginata, impaling him. Bursting through the door, she bisects the next guard, but is too late to stop him from ringing another alarm bell; the previous guards' blood had leaked under the door and alerted him.
Rushing up a spiral staircase, she opens the door to find a long stone corridor, with a periscope mirror on the ceiling- indicating that Fowler or someone with him is watching her. As the walls suddenly begin to move toward each other, Mizu rushes down the passage. She narrowly evades metal spears that suddenly extend from holes in the walls and ceiling, sliding, dodging and pole-vaulting around them, but is impaled just above her heel at the exit. Cutting the spear on either side, she staggers through just as the walls come together, falling to the ground to catch her breath.
Limping up another staircase, Mizu nearly falls due to her wound. After painfully removing the metal from her foot, she opens another door to face the next challenge: an outdoor passage hemmed by walls, leading to the castle's main keep. She prematurely triggers a trapdoor spanning the courtyard's width, which opens onto a pit of stakes, but manages to jump across it. Climbing a staircase, she is forced to jump across another double set of trapdoor-stakepits. Unable to clear the second one, she stabs her naginata into the wall and uses it to swing to the opposide side; she nearly falls in, but manages to catch herself, though leaving her naginata and sword embedded in the wall. However, a group of Shindo Clan samurai have emerged from the keep and attack her. Through sheer maneuverability and tenacity, Mizu manages to evade their swords and knock at least five of them into the stake pit (despite nearly falling in herself) while seizing the severed leg of one to deflect the blows, and finally impaling another through the chest with it. She is hurled against the wall, leaving her dazed, but halts her enemies' charge by revealing her hand grenade and threatening to pull the detonater cord. However, after a moment of consideration, Mizu releases the cord and allows the samurai to attack. Using the grenade as a club, she strikes out while dodging their blows strategically, so that her attackers stab or cleave each other rather than her. When only six of them remain, she finally seizes one of the dropped swords and cuts six of them down. She spares the last one, who retrieves her naginata using knotted obi and a warrior's severed head. Mizu then removes the interlocked weights from her sword's handle, returning it to a katana, and limps onwards.
Entering the keep's kitchen, she finds several castle staff preparing food, who observe her nervously. Mizu plunges her foot into a bucket of icewater to numb it, but as she takes a drink she notices notices another periscope-mirror watching her from the corner, and glares at it. She continues up yet another staircase ending at a door; it opens onto a room filled with a lantern-lit rock garden, containing a pack of saru (Japanese monkeys). As Mizu hesitantly crosses the room, one approaches her and offers her a flower, blowing its' hallucenogenic pollen into her face; she envisions the floor becoming glowing water and the ceiling the sky, as the saru (envisioned with glowing red eyes) drop from the rafters, advance and attack her for intruding on their territory. Pinned down, and with the monkeys' teeth nearly on her throat, Mizu desperately detonates and throws her grenade, killing several saru, concussing both the survivors and herself and collapsing the floor, dropping herself back into the kitchen. Deafened, she crawls to the bucket, immersing her head in it and screaming underwater until her hearing returns. Forcing herself back on her feet, she rushes up the stairs, leaping over the massive hole in the floor, and continues onward.
Mizu battles the prisoners
Still stunned and affected by the flowers' pollen, Mizu pauses at the next door, remembering various negative comments from Mikio, her mother, Taigen, Akemi and finally Ringo. She falls into a darkened pasage filled with prison cells, with Okiyama waiting for her at the opposite end. As she advances and the prisoners gather at their doors, she hallucinates them as rabid, zombie-like creatures. Okiyama suddenly triggers a lever that opens the cell doors, then smashes the lights, forcing Mizu to defend herself in darkness as the prisoners swarm around her. Mizu easily kills her unarmed and unarmored opponents, but is struck and bitten several times.
Left shaken at having killed many of Fowler and Shindo's victims, Mizu suddenly hears Ringo's voice. She follows it to a still-occupied cell, briefly hallucinating that the occupant is Mikio's and her ]mother', but instead finds Taigen, who has been imprisoned and tortured by Heiji Shindo. After confirming he is real, she helps him up, and they leave the corridor. Taigen tries to protest when they start up the next staircase, but Mizu insists they aren't leaving until she kills Fowler. They discover Okiyama waiting for them in the next room; he thumps his club on the ceiling, and the sound of many boots replies, indicating an entire band of samurai are waiting on the penultimate floor. Taigen insists he will help, claiming once again that no one can kill Mizu except him, but she shoves him to the ground, keeping him out of the fight, and draws her sword.
Mizu attempts to maneuver around Okiyama's club, but her reactions have been slowed by her wounds, stress and hallucination, and she is battered to the ground, grabbed by the throat and lifted off her feet, envisioning Okiyama as an oni. Thrown into Taigen, she narrowly evades Okiyama's blows, managing to land on his back and plunge her sword through both his club and shoulder. However, she is thrown off, seized again, and bear-hugged so hard several of her ribs crack. Letting loose a desperate scream of rage, Mizu suddenly leans forward and bites Okiyama's nose off, forcing him to release her. With her sword still embedded in his club, she uses them combined to avoid the giant's fists, eventually impaling his foot with her blade. She envisions stabbing him through the neck, but due to either his unnatural strength and/or her missing the strike due to hallucinating, the wound isn't fatal. Okiyama tosses her sword aside and seizes her by the neck, throttling her as a dropped lantern spreads fire across the room. On the verge of blacking out, Mizu triggers her remaining grenade and rams it into Okiyama's neck wound; as he drops her and staggers backward into the flames, the grenade detonates, vaporizing him and destroying most of the room. Stunned, Mizu once again hears Ringo's voice and experiences flashes of those who have most affected her life- accompanied by visions of ocean waves.
She awakens to find herself next to the blasted-out wall, with a nearly-unconscious Taigen about to slide over the edge of the precipice. Mizu seizes his hand, but is dragged over herself; she manages to stab her sword into the castle's outer wall, left hanging by one hand from her blade, which is ringing from the strain. In a furious burst of adrenaline, Mizu manages to pull Taigen onto her back and grab onto the ledge. Putting her katana between her teeth, she begins to torturously climb the sheer wall stone by stone, nearly falling at least once. Reaching the window of the penultimate tier of the castle, she notices the samurai inside are facing away from her toward the door; she chooses to keep climbing, bypassing them entirely.
Reaching the window unseen, she stabs right through it (killing one of the Shogun's aides who is there), then swings Taigen through, shattering the glass, and follows him inside, calling for Abijah Fowler. Noticing a map of Edo Castle on the table, she is distracted just long enough for Minister Chiba to lunge at her with a sword, but she easily blocks his blow and hurls him to the floor. However, this gives Fowler enough time to seize and fire a loaded musket at her; she attempts to deflect the shot with her sword, but the bullet breaks her already-strained blade in half, lodging in her shoulder and knocking her to her knees, in agony. Enraged, she charges Fowler blindly with her broken blade, but he easily avoids her swing and smashes her to the floor. When he begins torturing Taigen, Mizu attacks him again, only to be disarmed and dragged close. Fowler asks if she came after him because of what he 'just may be' to her, having deduced she is half- European by her features, and brags about having 'accounted' for all his other illegitimate children over the years, referring to the skeletons in the entrance tunnel.
When Mizu declares she will kill him, exposes the tattoo on her arm and reveals she is after the other white traders, Fowler begins angrily pummelling her. He is interrupted by Taigen, wielding Shindo's sword; when Fowler deflects his blow and turns his attention to Taigen, irritably asking why he's still alive as he beats him, Mizu hears and envisions Ringo again, specifically his words that he wants to be a samurai like her.
Muttering "Okay... I'll teach you," Mizu grabs her broken sword, lunges forward and pulls Taigen out of Fowler's grasp, diving out the broken window with him. Both of them plunge down the cliffs into the frozen sea below. Holding the unconscious Taigen, Mizu swims to the surface, but the ice breaks in her grip; weighed down, she starts to sink. As she begins to black out, a figure approaches on the surface...
Cast[]
Starring[]
- Maya Erskine as Mizu
- Masi Oka as Ringo
- Brenda Song as Akemi
- Darren Barnet as Taigen
- Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as The Swordmaker
- George Takei as Seki
- Randall Park as Heiji Shindo
- Kenneth Branagh as Abijah Fowler
Guest[]
- Marcus Choi as Kohei
- Ann Harada as Mama
- Byron Mann as Mikio
- Gedde Watanabe as Chiba