One-Punch Man‘s latest episode “The Metal Bat” mostly leaves series protagonist Saitama on the sidelines, in order to explore the larger world of heroes and villains beyond him. While season 2’s fourth episode introduces the titular S-Class hero Metal Bat, it also takes some time to delve even deeper into the backstory of new series big-bad, Garou!
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So far, One-Punch Man has spent a good deal of season 2 introducing us to just who Garou is and how his fearsome martial arts powers work, as well as reminding fans of the villains origin story and Hero Association connections. That latter part has revolved around the tale of how Garou went from being one of the top pupils of S-Class hero Silverfang, to being expelled from the martial arts hero’s dojo for viciously slaughtering his fellow students. Now, in episode 4, we finally get to see how that game-changing betrayal went down!
It’s actually Saitama who learns of Garou’s dark past with Bang/Silverfang, while impersonating the hero’s final pupil, Charanko, in the Super Fight martial arts tournament. Saitama is happened upon by one of Bang’s other pupils, Sour Face, who thinks he’s talking to Charanko. In that bit of martial arts gossip, Sour Face recounts the anecdote about the day that Garou finally turned against Bang’s dojo. As we see in the flashback sequence, Bang’s disciples were going about their usual training one day when Bang himself was absent, when suddenly Garou just stops practicing, declaring the following:
“I’m done. There nothing left to learn for me here. Let’s fight for real.”
What we see next is the bloody and violent image of Garou standing over the bodies of Bang’s disciples, with the blood flowing down his fist. As Sour Face explains to Saitama:
“He’d hidden his true self as he sharpened his fangs. If it hadn’t been for him, we wouldn’t have had to leave the dojo. Damn him!”
Sour Face goes on to explain that his entire reasoning for entering the latest Super Fight tournament is win it in order to ‘get his mojo back’ because then he’ll be certain that he can hold his own against Garou in battle. Of course, there’s every reason to believe that even if Sour Face does manage to win Super Fight (which is all but impossible with Saitama in the ring), he’d still likely end up in the hospital trying to throw down against Garou – like all the S-Class and A-Class heroes before him.
Episode by episode, One-Punch Man keeps fleshing out Garou in a way that makes the villain more interesting than a one-note baddie, which could be just the right kind of setup for making Garou’s arc fit snuggly over the entirety of season 2, rather than just having it flame-out too early as just another big conflict that Saitama settles with ease.
One-Punch Man season 2 streams new episodes every Tuesday on Funimation, Crunchyroll and Hulu.
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