Episode 10 – Helck – Anime News Network

I genuinely feel like I walked into a completely different show. Am I the only one who feels this way? Last week we ended on a dramatic cliffhanger and given the show’s tone, I figured there was going to be a fifty-fifty chance that it either meant absolutely nothing or it would somehow tie into the overarching story. Turns out it was more of the former than the latter. There’s some ominous foreshadowing I think going on here that might play a part later but overall, last week’s episode did sort of amount to a massive detour. But that’s fine because sometimes you need a moment of levity before you get back into the action right? Turns out Helck wants to take another week off from telling us what’s going on back home. So let’s just have an episode that is a spinoff/riff on cooking shows.

I get the feeling that if you’ve made it this far into the show then you’re pretty much committed to watching it until the end but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the point where people decided to walk away. It’s funny and it had a lot of one-off adorable moments that genuinely got a laugh out of me, particularly when it came to the reactions involving Piwi and Vermilio. My favorite part hands down was Piwi singing along with the women in the town square. I originally felt nothing towards this bird but they are growing on me. However, the majority of the time I just spent this episode staring at my screen slack-jawed wondering what on earth I’m supposed to take away from this.

It felt like the author wrote this episode to be funny to a very specific subset of people and I just didn’t fit into that category. It feels like this has always been the appeal of the author’s works and I’m just now starting to “get” it. That makes this episode incredibly hard to judge on its own but I have to because if I compare it to the larger story then I’m gonna walk away feeling a little bit disappointed. It seems like the show is set on following Helck and Vermilio for the next couple of episodes so I assume that there’s going to be a very big change in the status quo by the time we get back to the demon empire. However, it’s become incredibly clear now that we’re not gonna get there for a while and I genuinely don’t know if that’s a good thing.

Rating:

Helck is currently streaming on
HIDIVE.