JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S02E07-8 Review: Gorillas On A Freighter

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stardust Crusaders, Episode 7: Strength; Episode 8: Devil

Another duo of villain-of-the-week fights, and they're... they're starting to get bizarre, all right. Episode 7 starts off with a conversation between Dio and Enya, and I guess we're at a point in the story where these conversations haven't quite gotten as repetitive as they would become, and is still somewhat ominous. It's basically a rehash of the conversation they had about conquering fear, and an excuse for Enya to list off the seven other Stand users that Dio has under his command (oh, yes, only seven...). Enya lists Empress, Emperor, Devil, Strength, Hanged Man, Wheel of Fortune and Temperance, but we're basically going down the entire Major Arcana. And that's only for the first half of Stardust Crusaders. We also get the confirmation at the end of the episode that the man Polnareff wants to kill, the dude with two hands, is one of Dio's minions and in fact Enya's grandson.

After a bit of a 'yare yare' from Jotaro while they and a bunch of fodder crew members get into a life boat, they encounter a huge-ass cargo ship with nothing in it but a single orangutan in a cage. The episode plays on ghost ship tropes, I suppose, and a mysterious-stalker-in-a-secluded-area bit, and we get a genuinely brutal moment when one of the sailors got stabbed through the face with a crane hook.

But, of course, it's the orangutan that's the actual villain, because the episode also focuses equal screentime on the genuine weirdness surrounding Forever the orangutan, with how he has cigarettes, Rubik cubes and Playboy magazines. He's apparently able to control the entire ship to his whim, but that mostly just involves throwing propellers and hooks around, and causing people to sink into walls. Also, Forever is a perverted monkey that really, really gets excited and wants to do some naughty things to a young girl taking a bath. Thankfully, Jotaro's there to murder this perverted monkey by usage of ripping off his button and using it as a projectile (because it's not part of the ship) and using the Star Finger in its final appearance.

This is straight-up one of the weirdest stories I've read in JJBA, with a perverted ape captain that has  stand that transforms a dinghy into a giant cargo ship that everyone can walk around on, and even non-Stand-users can see. There's a handwave about the Strength stand being super-powerful that it can be seen even by muggles, but honestly it's just pretty weird. I guess a good chunk of why Forever doesn't just kill our heroes is that apes are dumb? Eh.

Episode 9 takes place entirely in Singapore, or, more accurately, in a hotel. The episode starts off with Polnareff being confronted for littering and being fined by a Singaporean police, starting off a trend of the Crusaders travelling from one country to the next and spending a scene being bamboozled by the strange culture there. It's borderline racist in these days, maybe, but speaking as someone who's been to Singapore a lot of times, it's not inaccurate.

"Devil" then quickly settles in our characters in a hotel, with Polnareff getting a private room. There's a weird creepy Chucky-esque doll, and Polnareff quickly realizes there's a dude hiding in the hotel fridge because villain-of-the-week Devo the Cursed didn't bother hiding the drinks he took out from the fridge. Devo unleashes his Stand, Ebony Devil, and fights Polnareff a bit before getting cut up and jumping out of the window. Polnareff informs Joseph and Avdol, both of whom seem way too calm for realizing that a Stand is attacking them right at that moment. Avdol even knows of the name Devo the Cursed, being apparently a Native American shaman-assassin, but doesn't actually divulge this information to Polnareff for some reason?

And honestly, for all Devo's talk about how his Stand will now bear a 'grudge' against Polnareff for injuring him and drawing blood, Ebony Devil basically just possesses the doll and only gets the jump on Polnareff by hamstringing him under the bed when he dropped the key down there. Yes, Polnareff can't actually see anything going on in the room and Silver Chariot ended up fighting blind until Polnareff breaks a mirror, but it's honestly somewhat contrived that this ability is giving Polnareff so much trouble, really. And even then, Silver Chariot could easily just aimed for the approximate location of where Polnareff's hands and legs were bound.

There's a gruesome bit where Ebony Devil slices off the face of some poor room service schmuck, and a whole bit where instead of stabbing Polnareff in the head, Devo goes through this whole deal of pouring alcohol all over the room, and using a malfunctioning hairdryer to set it on fire. But, of course, Polnareff stabs the puppet and "slices up everything except for your balls", killing Devo. While not a bad villain-of-the-week sequence and one that gives Polnarefff some neat spotlight, it's not one that I think was paced pretty poorly.

This episode has a brief sequence at the end of the handwave of Polnareff being cleared by the police, while Joseph has developed Hermit Purple to use a television program to string up a sentence for prophetic "spirit messages", while Dio ends up blowing up the television when he realizes Joseph is spying on him. Overall, these two episodes aren't the best JJBA has to offer, but they're still decent fights, I suppose.

The JoJo Playlist

• The old hag that acts as Dio's lieutenant is named Enya, named after Irish musician Enya.
• Forever is explicitly stated to be named after the Wu-Tang Clan album Wu-Tang Forever by the author.
• Devo the Cursed is, of course, named after the American band Devo,