BEM Episode 5 Review: Sweeper

BEM’s tone and storyline might be a little all over the place but its cast and soundtrack are so damn good. This week’s villain is a human that desperately wants to be become a vacuum cleaner. Yes, don’t be surprised; you read that correctly.

Plot

Yet another crazy killer runs the streets of the Outside, and this particular individual wears a vacuum cleaner suit that helps him clean up the ‘trash’ around the city, humans included. Bem fights him and easily defeats him but the killer escapes. Meanwhile in Upper, Sonia and her Head Officer go to report the incidents that happened before, where the humanoid monsters were involved. They are instructed that they will be assisted by a special division and its Head Operative, Felt, in order to capture the monsters and take them to the Unseen Council. The wannabe vacuum-cleaner-guy goes back to the crazy scientist who upgrades him and makes him literally a huge vacuum machine. The killer then goes around vacuuming the whole city, killing everyone on sight. When Sonia arrives at the scene and reports the incident while requesting backup, she is once again saved by Bem. Long story short, Bem defeats the killer, Felt comes and tries to capture Bem, Bela and Belo save Bem, Sonia witnesses once more that the humanoids monsters are on their side and the Unseen Council sexy lady wants Bem really bad.

Episode Highlights

Onee-chan it’s dangerous: The moment I saw Bela walking down a street full of drunk homeless people, I was so sure that someone would try to pick her up. Her reaction was also to be expected, because come on, she is an overpowered humanoid monster after all.

‘Please make me a proper vacuum cleaner’: This line killed me. I cannot believe that they wrote this as part of his character development. And the worst thing is that they actually tried to justify it as well, by giving him a dramatic-psychotic past to make us understand the reason why he went crazy and wants to become a vacuum cleaner. He cleaned his house and then because his mother’s boyfriend was abusing him, he realized that he had to clean humans as well. Honestly, this whole story was so absurd that I can’t help but love it.

‘He said he was cleaning up’: Even Bem doesn’t seem to take any of these guys seriously. When Bela asks what this guy’s deal is, they both have this expression that says it all: ‘Oh my, not this shit again.’

Mysterious Lady is thirsty for Bem: She doesn’t seem to care that much about the other two. She only wants to find her Alpha. Is this going to be some kind of weird love story, because at this point of the show, I am down with anything.

Themes & Trivia

The cast of this show is getting better and better: The cast of voice actors is surprisingly good for this production. We have Junichi Suwabe (known for his roles as Undertaker in Black Butler, Keigo Atobe in The Prince of Tennis, Victor Nikiforov in Yuri!!! on ICE etc.) voicing the crazy scientist, Maaya Sakamoto (known for Haruhi Fujioka in Ouran High School Host Club, Ciel Phantomhive in Black Butler, Shinobu Oshino in Monogatari, etc.) as the Mysterious Lady of the Unseen Council, and in this week’s episode Daisuke Ono (known for Erwin Smith in Attack on Titan, Sebastian Michaelis in Black Butler, Jotaro Kujo in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) was introduced as Felt. Is it just me or did they just re-cast the entire cast from Black Butler?

Fun fact about the opening: It is actually performed by Maaya Sakamoto (Mysterious Lady) as well and it’s her 30th single song. The song is titled ‘Uchu no Kioku‘ (The memory of the space) and you can check the music video for it here.

Comments

I am not going to lie, this episode made me laugh a lot with its villain. The concepts of all the antagonists are so childish, that it’s kind of entertaining to watch their ridiculous dynamic combined with a mysterious dark setting. I know that I have mentioned this so many times by now, but I think this is the main reason that’s against the show. They tried to remake a 1960s tacky kid shown into a serious action series without re-designing the enemies, so this kind of result was to be expected.