This one smacks of being unfinished. It couldn't be more obvious that there were scenes they couldn't film, or they ran out of time in the edit, or something along those lines. You don't at all get to see what happens to the monster Peter - it's unclear whether he's still alive, still a threat, but in the next scene it seems like the boxer Joe is just fine and going back to his career. Why? He was so depressed before. It's especially unlike Ultra Q to be so vague. But more than that...It's that dance scene that's legit like two minutes long. They had to fill that time because they didn't have anything else. So they took b-roll of the dance and put it in. Whether it's a AAA video-game like Kingdom Hearts 3, or a random TV episode from 1966, you can always tell an unfinished product. Hope the final 2 episodes are better.
A boxer disappears before a championship fight and is later found by the Q crew...as a clown. And, the boxer/clown has a pet alligator who grows to be dog-sized if removed from water. Yeah, this is almost unwatchable.
Review by noelctBlockedParentSpoilers2024-02-03T13:07:39Z
Continuing to work my way through Ultra Q in production order. "Blazing Victory" aired near the end of the series as episode 26, but was produced as episode 19.
This definitely feels the most like an anthology episode as you could remove the tiny kaiju element entirely, and you'd have a compelling character drama about a champion boxer at the height of his fame succumbing to the anxieties of expectations, so he runs away and becomes a clown at a fancy ocean resort. The stylized direction is striking, with sharp transitions, slick montages, and these interesting bits where the image will freeze, a person will be outlined then cut out, and the next scene will play within their silhouette. And Peter, the semi-kaiju, could just have been a regular animal, like a boa constrictor or an elephant or something. Him being a gekko who expands when he's dried out doesn't really go anywhere but a needless little bit of destruction at the end, though on a character level he still works as a projection of the boxer's emotions that he clings to. Our lead trio are also well used, putting the focus on their reporter skills as they stumble across the prize fighter's new life and dig into it, only to question whether they want to publish the story and hurt a man who's already in the midst of an existential struggle.
I get that this isn't the type of episode people expect from a series like this, but on its own terms, it really is one of the best single stories so far.