What is a recap? A miserable little pile of spoilers!
Last we left off, our heroes had found the Belmont Hold and begun to search inside of it, Carmilla had started to plot against her own liege, and Godbrand had surprising amounts of intelligence.
Today we’ll dive into the fourth episode of Castlevania season two, “Broken Mast.”
1. The Unlife and Death of Godbrand
Godbrand has the closest to a focus in this episode, present in its opening as well as its closing moments.
The tale opens on a dream Godbrand has of his time on his own, presumably during his own era of piracy, with him chasing down and brutally murdering “livestock” before escaping on his longboat with his own crew of presumed fellow vampires. If that brief showing means anything, he operates best as the leader of his own group, but not in wide-sweeping plots of nations, much like he is presented otherwise.
His lack of respect for authority also is placed rather highly. When he awakens and demands “blood and beer” from his fellow, lower-ranking vampires, receiving a pig (the blood of which he had previously said gives him digestive problems) prompts him to believe that perhaps Carmilla had a point, and that they had to “do something” about Dracula’s leadership. Assembling several other generals in a raid on a nearby, nameless village (rather than keeping a low profile to make it harder for the living to attack the army), he shows how he can bring up the generals’ more selfish instincts for blood and violence, despite being unintelligent in a variety of ways.
Unfortunately, his disrespect for Dracula leads him to make a fatal mistake: going to Isaac. In the heat of the Devil Forgemaster’s workplace, Godbrand complains about the lack of any real battle plan (as he had addressed to Hector before) and the lack of information regarding Alucard being comatose under Gresit, among other things, eventually bringing up the idea of removing Dracula from control in order to allow his plans to go through in a smoother fashion. By speaking his reservations and his implied plans to the one human who is the most loyal to Dracula out of anyone in the army, the Viking effectively signs his (final) death warrant and a one-way trip to Helheim at Isaac’s spiked belt and ritual knife before he can attempt his betrayal in earnest.
2. Growing Fondness
During their time in the Belmont Hold, Trevor and Sypha are growing ever closer. While the former is still irreverent as ever, the latter appears to have gotten used to him, telling jokes at his expense and laughing with him, with their mutual good humor surprising Alucard from a distance.
While Alucard is kind, Sypha notes that he is similar to an “icy well of sadness” compared to Trevor showing his true self, good and bad, in their searches through the family archives. Of course, he is on the hunt to kill his own father and is amongst the skeletal remains of other vampires, so his reactions are hardly surprising.
In a moment of kindness, Trevor even allows Sypha to sleep within the folds of his cloak, noting that “no one ever slept cold in [his] house.” It seems that their animosity is giving way to romance, as was implied in the first season finale.
3. Carmilla the Schemer
Speaking more with Hector, Carmilla has dispensed with any and all illusions of wanting to work with Dracula. Noting their liege’s diminishing sanity and poor judgment, she tells her plan: while Dracula’s forces sack Bralia, she will have her own Styrian troops assault and take over the castle itself, asserting her own dominance over vampire kind. While her words could be seen as positive to vampires as a whole and a means to keep them capable of surviving, such as it is to Hector, it is blatantly obvious that her only real goal is to take leadership from the man in charge and stop serving under yet another crazed old man.
In fact, her goals would not be so obvious, even with her rant to Godbrand previously, if not for the fact that she so heavily focused on Bralia over Arges. The latter was more or less landlocked, while the former is a river town. While vampires could prevent escape by the water, they also could just as easily be surrounded by the opposing humans due to being unable to cross running water themselves, essentially boxing themselves in against a larger force if not used effectively.
Continued belowHector, for his part, doesn’t seem to truly understand what he is being told. While he does want to help vampires to cull humanity, his only reservation about Carmilla’s plan seems to be that she would not have nearly enough troops from Styria to take over the castle by force. Carmilla seems to even acknowledge this, even as she seems to disregard Dracula’s still-threatening power, and reveals to him that his night creatures are meant to supplement her own forces in the attempted assault.
4. Isaac, Dear Friend
Isaac has had a far deeper connection to Dracula than the other generals in the army. Unlike they, who consider him their leader or an obstacle (or both), Isaac sees Dracula as both a true master and seemingly his dearest friend. This difference ties back to how he and Dracula met in the first place: unlike Hector, who was merely one of several people the vampire met on his travels abroad, Isaac had been saved from being hunted and killed by people who wanted to sell his body parts to other magicians as spell components. As such, Isaac seems to feel he owes Dracula his life. Taken further, when the vampire lord met with the human in the year he spent assembling his armies, he did not tell any lies by omission as he had with Hector, outright admitting to complete extermination of humanity as a species being his goal. Due to his loyalty and experiences, Isaac did not hesitate to agree in the slightest.
The bond of friendship goes both ways. They each recall the exact details of their first meeting, and use them to discern whether or not they are still one another’s friend. Isaac is the sole general with whom Dracula is willing to tell the truth without reservation, due to him grasping the “necessity” of his genocidal mission, and even to calm down and perhaps smile on occasion for things other than the occasional joke at someone else’s expense.
5. Disbanded Loyalties
The leader of vampire society is well aware of changes waiting in the wings. Godbrand previously talked back to him, and while he had stopped short of rebellion, the concept was still in the air. Carmilla and Hector have been meeting without consulting him first, giving the idea of a coalition within the allegedly allied forces. The other vampire generals do not even have lines, and so are presumably not conversing with Dracula himself at all.
With various people turning against him or otherwise not consulting him on a regular basis, Dracula has turned to Isaac for counsel, meeting him in his workplace. As part of their discussion, the Count asks whether or not the Devil Forgemaster is still his friend. Answered affirmatively, he notes that Isaac “may be alone” in that status.
