Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of people saying Trigun went hard and people love it in ep3 but like I'm guessing all these people never read the manga?
That was the main complaint with the original anime. It was very tame standard shounen tone that diverged from the manga by midway and did its own thing. I enjoyed it, but if you read the manga, it's a way more violent fucked up body horror seinen manga. It's no Berserk or anything, but it's pretty violent and mean spirited/dark.
Ep3 didn't surprise me because once the Gung-Ho-Guns and Knives show up, every story is full of violence and death as they mentally torture Vash to try to break his no killing rule.
I just wish the show as directed better. For all the brutality, I just found ep3 really dull to watch. I don't normally watch CG animation shows, so maybe it's just inherent in the medium but it just felt like every scene was animated in slow motion. Very slow.
The best scenes so far in the show have been the high-octane speeds like some bits of Ep1 and in Ep2 there's a chase where Vash is running through 3d environment and it looks really nice. Trigun is supposed to be a high-octane sci-fi western.