Sea Slugs! Anime Blog

In typical anime fashion, Trinity Blood appears to be opening with a series of standalone episodes, and this time around we’re dropped in the middle of an investigation by Abel and the cyborg Tres (codename Gunslinger). A rash of grisly murders has the Vatican’s AX organization on their toes, but this time around it’s the vampires that are turning up dead. They duo find a small girl hiding at the crime scene, but she escapes Abel’s grasp by touching him on the forehead and sending him into a comatose state where he has a very vivid nightmare about a tragic event in his past. Tres, being a cyborg, is immune to such manipulation, and handily captures the young girl.

It turns out that the girl, Ellis, is a witch whose touch-telepathy ability allows her to control other beings, and is the cause behind all the recent deaths. Because of her ability, she led a life of persecution, but is also targeted by vampire organizations such as Rosenkreuz that wish to harness her powers. Though the interrogation process, Abel succeeds in gaining her trust by protecting her from Tres, who had orders to terminate her if she attempted to escape. Unfortunately as a result, Tres’s friend-or-foe indicator now labels Abel as target practice. Luckily, Abel manages to short circuit Tres and safely hand over Ellis to a nun of the St. Rachel convent.

Or rather, to the vampire pretending to be a nun. Come on Abel, isn’t it obvious that nuns don’t look like goth-chicks? As it happens, Abel’s superior (codename Professor) slipped a tracking device on Ellis during his rather pathetic interrogation attempt, and a rescue operation is set in motion. This operation consists solely of dropping Gunslinger from the sky into the vampire’s hideout and letting him terminate everything inside. Abel is also present though, and saves Tres from a surprise attack by the vampiress. He then goes Kresnik on her while Tres bring Ellis outside. Afterwards, Abel and Ellis have a happy reunion, until Tres points his gun at Abel and restates that he’s considered a dangerous element marked for elimination…but his firing chamber click empty, and Tres decides to save it for another day. At that moment, the severly mutated vampiress leaps out of the building and attacks with metal spikes fused into her arms, but Tres whips around and feeds her a hearty serving of lead. Looks like he just pretended to be out of ammo This wins Ellis’s approval, and she happily dashes after the silent Gunslinger.

I really like the classic pairing between the goofy but humanitarian Abel and the cold, emotionless Tres - you can feel the immense tension between the two powerful beings, and one can only wait in anticipation for the inevitable clash between them. Well, aside from the preliminary confrontation with the electric wires; that was just plain silly. Tres must have let Abel win, because it’s pretty hard to miss someone who runs straight into your gunfire, and Abel was still in human form. Plus, Tres missed quite a bit when spotting Ellis in the beginning; those didn’t all look like warning shots. But as evidenced by his actions at the end, there’s more in his head then just plain circuitry.

I also got a huge kick out of Tres’s pose-centric gun-kata, and his last action scene reminded me of a nearly identical scene in the movie Equilibrium.