Black Lagoon – Questions Best Left Unasked [Eps 1 - 24]
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Chicks with guns in turmoil? Now there’s a twist. Initially Revvy fulfills everything about the male wank fantasy: aggressively masculine, acrobatically violent, nihilistically badass. I started watching Black Lagoon with a tentative shrug, thinking it seems nicely made and reliably entertaining – probably won’t change my life, but sometimes meathead action shows done well really hit the spot.
Then we get a rather interesting scene. After a whacky run-in with some thinly-valed Neo Nazis Revvy and Rock, initially an ineffectual fish-out-of-water protagonist, find themselves in a sunken Nazi u-boat waxing philosophical about the nature of human value systems. During this conversation Revvy suddenly jumps from gun-toting arse-candy to a bleakly thoughtful existentialist. What she says won’t rock the worlds of anyone who has read a Wikipedia article on the subject, but in the context of the show it was quite a shock. We actually get some qualification for her amorally violent tendencies and, damn, character development for an archetype otherwise shallowly reserved for Awesome Action Sequences and not much else.