The other week, Netflix dropped the first season of One Piece, its live-action remake of the phenomenally popular anime series. Adapting anime to live-action is a tricky business, something Netflix knows well. They made a live-action Death Note movie and nobody liked it. They made a Bleach movie and nobody remembers it. They made a Cowboy Bebop show and canceled it almost immediately. But they were determined to eventually get this right…
And with One Piece, it feels like they did. Speaking as someone who never read the manga or watched the anime, I had a good time with the show. The cast is likable, the production values are insane, and the story about young pirates on the high seas has a giddy enthusiasm that got past my defenses, even if there’s still a lot of anime silliness to be found. One Piece isn’t afraid to embrace that silliness, which made me admire it even more.
That’s not to say it’s a perfect show, though. I’ve never seen a show I’ve liked so much I couldn’t pick it apart and drain all the fun out of it. With that in mind, let’s rank the episodes of Netflix’s One Piece from worst to best!
Worst: Episodes 3 and 4, “Tell No Tales” and “The Pirates Are Coming”
At the outset, let me explain why I’m grouping some episodes together. The first season of One Piece operates in a series of two-episode arcs, something that becomes clear around the time of Episodes 3 and 4. Over the course of these two episodes, Monkey D. Luffy and his burgeoning pirate crew visit Syrup Village, they meet a self-aggrandizing young man named Usopp, they get roped into a plot to kill a good-hearted local heiress, they defeat the perpetrators, and then leave with Usopp as a new member of their crew. These two episodes tell one story, so I’m treating them as one whole.
And this is the weakest story told in the first season. By this point, we’ve gotten to know a few of our main players, including the ever-optimistic pirate captain Luffy, the taciturn swordsman Zoro, and the hard-boiled thief Nami. But we don’t know them too well yet, so it’s a bit of an awkward time to bring in another new character like Usopp. At the end of this two-episode arc, it feels like no one got the time they needed.
An example: at the end of the second episode, Usopp decides to leave Syrup Village to join Luffy’s crew, and…I didn’t know why. We got some flashbacks establishing that he tends to tell tall tales, misses his absentee pirate father, and suffered the loss of his mother. But still, it seemed to me like he had a good reason to remain, namely the affection of Kaya, the good-hearted heiress we mentioned earlier. He wasn’t fleshed out enough.
Instead, we spend a lot of time on the murder plot, which involves Kaya’s ex-pirate butler planning to kill her once she comes of age and claim her vast inheritance. There’s a long period where the butler is chasing our characters through the halls, scraping his knife-hands on the walls and in general being a big evil ham. That’s not such a bad thing on this show — I liked that his followers wore little cat ears and hissed at people — but it should have been tightened up.
My favorite part of the episode actually had nothing to do with the main plot; it was getting a look into Zoro’s past and seeing why he wants to become the greatest swordfighter in the world. I would have preferred that be in its own episode so we could spend more time on Usopp, but this is clearly a labor-intensive show and I understand we can’t have as many episodes as we want.
Happily, this is the only block of episodes I had real problems with. It’s all uphill from here, starting with…
Better: Episodes 7 and 8, “The Girl with the Sawfish Tattoo” and “Worst in the East”
The two-part finale focuses on Nami, who probably has the most thankless role in the cast. Luffy is a Looney Tunes character come to life, Usopp has his tall tales, Sanji is a womanizing ninja-cook, and even the stone-faced Zoro gets to fight with a sword held between his teeth. In the midst of all this wackiness, Nami can come off as a bit of a buzzkill schoolmarm keeping the class from spinning out of control.
That said, her story is probably the most relatable of any of our principals, and actor Emily Rudd does the best job of finding a human emotional core to her character. Nami is working with a gangster named Arlong (who is also a fish-man, go figure) as part of a long-term plan to buy back her home village, which is currently under Arlong’s control. Working for Arlong has made Nami hard inside, but she still has a good heart, something that Luffy sees even if she tries to deny it.
The show benefits from keeping Nami’s backstory obscured until the end, when it dovetails with a big action climax where the Straw Hat Pirates square off against Arlong’s men. These episodes try to be a little more serious than usual, which can cause issues. For instance, after Arlong burns down Nami’s village, the villagers all gather up to help battle the gangsters, but Nami says, “This isn’t your fight.” Uh…the guy just burned down their village, it absolutely is. I also thought it was odd how Luffy got to be the one to take down Arlong when Nami has the most emotional baggage with him. I don’t know how these events play out in the anime, but I would have been in favor of changing some things around.
The season ends on a good note, with Luffy finally getting a wanted poster; we see people from throughout his life get a look at it and reflect on how far we’ve come in a short time. It makes you want a second season. We’ll see if that ever happens.
Better Still: Episode 1, “Romance Dawn”
One Piece is a ridiculous show. The concept sounds simple enough — young man wants to be a pirate, goes and does it — but the details are crazy. Our lead character, Monkey D. Luffy, isn’t just a precocious would-be pirate king; he’s a precocious pirate king who is essentially made of rubber and can stretch his limbs to ludicrous lengths. He ate a magic fruit when he was a kid so now he can do this. I already mentioned the cat pirates, and they’re among the more conservative pirates we meet. People in this universe apparently communicate using living snail-like creatures as telephones. And every other person’s hair is a kind of heretofore undiscovered radioactive color.
One Piece is based on an anime, and anime are known for these kinds of wild, exaggerated features. The accomplishment of Netflix’s series is that it preserves many of these features in live-action form, and yet somehow doesn’t look ridiculous. Once your eyes adjust, it all sort of coheres.
And once you’re in, you can start marveling at the design. Early in this series premiere, we see the ship of a pirate captain named Alvida, which has a huge bird masthead and giant pink hearts on the sails. One Piece commits to this gaudy excess so completely that it becomes delightful rather than cringeworthy.
The performances are like that too. As Monkey D. Luffy, Iñaki Godoy is boundlessly enthusiastic in a way that you’d think might get annoying, but his joy is infectious and eventually you just let it take you away.
That’s basically what happens to characters like Kobe, Zoro and Nami, all of whom we meet in this episode, which revolves around Luffy trying to break into a Marine base and steal a treasure map. There are a lot of moving parts to this premiere, and while it’s fun, it can be a lot to take in as the show tries to introduce us to so much so fast.
Still, this is a confident premiere episode that clearly knows what it wants to do. The follow-up episode might be even better, or at least more memorable…
Terrific: Episode 2, “The Man In The Straw Hat”
One Piece looks great. That’s clear right at the top. And every episode gives us something new to gawk at. “The Man In The Straw Hat” pits Luffy and his new friends against Buggy the Clown, an unhinged pirate who can break down his body and use the pieces as weapons. Actor Jeff Ward brings just the right combination of dangerous and goofy, very nearly walking away with the whole show.
Buggy holds court in a massive big top tent; he’s chained the local villagers to the seats and forces them to laugh at his deranged circus. It’s genuinely menacing as well as spectacular to look at. One Piece builds enormous, elaborate sets for almost every episode. Between that and the fight scenes, which in the case of Buggy and Luffy are cheerfully free from the constraints of human physics, this show is a playground for the senses.
While it’s dazzling us with those displays, “The Man in the Straw Hat” also features flashbacks to Luffy’s past, back when he was a kid and idolized a pirate named Shanks. Luffy as a character is so cartoon-like that he’s almost unbelievable, but these flashbacks ground him in emotional reality. There’s a great moment under Buggy’s tent where Luffy parrots something Shanks said years earlier, and we can tell how much of an influence this man had on our stretchy friend. Like a lot of things on One Piece, Luffy is juuuust at the edge of too much, but doesn’t go over the line.
Thinking about it, you could argue that these two episodes operate as a two-parter, since they’re both focused on introducing Luffy, but they don’t feel that way since the gang go up against different adversaries in each hour. But after this, it’s back to the proper two-parters:
Best: Episodes 5 and 6, “Eat at Baratie!” and “The Chef and the Chore Boy”
One Piece really comes into its own in the back half of the season, particularly with the one-two punch of Episodes 5 and 6. These episodes have it all, starting with the eye-popping set for Baratie, a giant fish-shaped restaurant in the middle of the sea. Are passing pirates enough to support a floating luxury restaurant? Unclear, but who cares? It’s beautiful.
At Baratie we meet young chef Sanji and his boss Zeff. Like most of the characters, they have a pulpy past to share with us. Of all the flashbacks this season, I liked Sanji’s the best. The story of how he and Zeff met and survived a shipwreck was surprisingly scary and tender, complete with an unexpected twist. It’s the best example of how One Piece manages to balance its goofy aesthetic with its occasionally darker themes.
I also like the way actor Taz Skylar fights as Sanji, so there’s another arrow in the show’s action scene quiver.
So Sanji is our big new introduction here. But unlike with Episodes 3 and 4, “Eat at Baratie!” and “The Chef and the Chore Boy” manage to involve the rest of the cast in meaningful ways. Zoro has a chance to prove himself the strongest swordsman in the world by fighting a powerful warlord named Mihawk, who beats Zoro nearly to death despite only using a tiny knife. Once again, there’s that juxtaposition of the sincere and the extremely silly that this show seems to love.
As a result, Zoro has his most emotionally honest moment on the show yet, and fully commits himself to being a part of Luffy’s crew. At the same time, Nami feels the call of her past and abandons the crew. And all of this presents the unstoppably cheerful Luffy with a real crisis of confidence.
So this is the meatiest section of the season emotionally as well as the most visually impressive. It’s great, and I hope One Piece returns for a second season as soon as possible.
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