The Straw Hats are face-to-face with the ones responsible for the attack on Iceberg, which they took the blame for, as well as their former crewmate, Nico Robin. The confrontation goes poorly, as Robin seems to have fully broken with the crew. Worse, the two strongest Straw Hats, Luffy and Zoro, are easily trounced by the government assassins, who have trained in the art of "Six Powers", turning their very bodies into weapons.
The agents are also ruthless and more than a little sadistic. When their leader, Rob Lucci, is confronted by one of the shipwrights he's worked with for years now as part of his cover, Lucci says he knows this must be difficult to accept. Instead of following with a bland justification about it not being personal, Lucci's asks if smashing Iceberg's face in would help drive the point home.
With the Straw Hats down and the Galley-La HQ burning, the remainder of volume 37 turns to Franky, leader of the local criminal underworld. He's got Usopp and the Going Merry as hostages to lure out Luffy for a rematch. But, upon learning Usopp left the Straw Hats, Franky offers him a place in his gang. Usopp declines, dead set on finishing repairing Merry and sailing back home to the East Blue. Which is when Franky intervenes, echoing the assessment of the Galley-La shipwrights that Merry's done as a sailing vessel.
The surprise here is that Usopp admits he's known all about it since the crew's adventure to the sky islands. He saw a child repairing Merry one night, and was certain somehow it actually was the ship. (The spirit of a ship that's loved enough by its crew to manifest is apparently a real thing in One Piece, according to Franky.)
Even knowing this, Usopp's unwilling to just give up and let the Merry go. If Merry is going to work so hard to keep sailing for them, then he doesn't see how he can do any less for the ship. There's probably a lot tied into the fact Usopp's mother died of an illness when he was 7. All he could do was assure her his father (the sniper of Red-Haired Shanks' crew, the guy who gave Luffy his hat) was coming back soon, and watch her slowly waste away.
(There's a fair amount of division in the fandom about whether Yasopp's a shit dad or not. Supposedly the text says Banchina encouraged him to join Shanks and go to sea, because she knew it was something he loved. So he didn't abandon them, the "not a shit dad" contingent argues. But Banchina's been dead 10 years by the time Usopp meets Luffy, and Yasopp apparently didn't come back to visit once in that entire time. Even Cyclops only took like a year to go back to look in on Maddy Pryor and his kid. When you're more delinquent than Scott Summers, I think we can safely rule you're a Shit Dad.)
That's about the point Lucci and the others find Franky, because he's the one hiding the blueprints of the ancient warship they want. Franky gets as effortlessly trounced by Lucci as everyone else, so Oda can instead dive into his tragic backstory. Basically, Franky's selfishness and casual discarding of the warships he was building ended up getting his and Iceberg's mentor arrested by the World Government, and Franky feels guilty about it. To the extent he got run over by the Sea Train trying to stop it from taking away said mentor (who also built the ship of the previous Pirate King, so I guess Oda's going for symmetry when Franky ultimately builds Luffy's new ship). Yes, the cyborg's face turn is in full swing!
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