JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S02E14-15 Review: The Haunted Village

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stardust Crusaders, Episode 14-15: Justice

Well, this two-parter is.... pretty slow-paced, huh? It does deal with one of the bigger villains, Enya, shown to us as Dio's majordomo and a constant presence at the beginning of ever other episode. At the same time, though, I genuinely don't think the Justice stand really deserves having its powers stretched over two episodes, and neither is Enya's whole "complete psychopath disguised as a nice old grammy" shtick is enough to make her particularly compelling. Sure, Enya herself is pretty memorable, the voice-acting's done well and the artwork marvelously sells Enya flicking back and forth between a nice little old lady and a complete monster. I just don't necessarily think the whole sequence of events really deserved taking two entire episodes to tell. While I get that they're being faithful to the source material, there are definitely some scenes that could be done a bit quicker.

A good chunk of the episode's slow pacing comes from the first part, episode 14. After dealing with some status quo stuff -- Jotaro getting a new jacket (exactly the same as the old jacket) and the crew dumping the little girl off as they go off to Pakistan (a very welcome move) the episode quickly moves into "ghost town" territory. After a hilarious attempt at Old Man Joseph butchering the pronunciation of Assalamualaikum, they find out that the foggy town they're in is pretty weird. Nobody says anything, there's a dead man with huge bloodless holes, cockroaches crawling out of a man's body... yeah, we're in a ghost town setting at this point.

We see a bit where Joseph does a hammy JoJo vaulting pose, only to find himself jumping straight into a bunch of spikes  which he is forced to use Hermit Purple to rescue himself from. "OH NOOO!" indeed, because considering what we know of how Enya's Stand Justice works, this particular bit feels just out of nowhere and doesn't feel like it adds anything beyond "oh no, the town is creepy".

And then... everyone just shrugs it off and goes along with the nice old lady that offers them a room? You'd think their priority is to figure out the Stand that's causing the weird holes in the corpse or whatever befuddled Joseph's senses, but nope, everyone lets their guard down in the nice hotel, and both Joseph and Kakyoin aren't even seen for the rest of the arc. Jotaro is suspicious, but mostly just exists to deliver stern "are you sure this is X?" comments, but not really being proactive until the second episode. Indeed, most of Enya's interactions is  with Polnareff. We get some near slip-ups when Enya calls "Mr Joestar" exactly that before they had proper introductions, although we do get the neat detail of her having to wrap up her second right hand.

Polnareff ends up being the focus of this pair of episodes, although this time around there's the excuse of him being the main recipient of Enya's vengeance. Of course, Polnareff is the perfect gentleman to Enya, "flirting" with her and taking pity at the story that Enya had recently lost her son.

And as Polnareff goes to the toilet (what is it with Polnareff and foreign toilets?) Hol Horse ends up being the second antagonist to return, ready to avenge J. Geil... but ends up getting stabbed by Enya as revenge for leaving J. Geil to die and running away like a coward. Hol Horse tries to explain that he didn't even witness J. Geil's death and arrived too late, but, y'know, Enya's crazy. We get the explanation of Enya's stand, Justice... which is a lot less cool since all it ultimately does is a fog that controls people through wounds. It's pretty horrifying, but the fact that it sort of ends up playing for another episode sort of makes it feel a lot less impressive. There's the zombie swarm, of course, and the fun bit of Silver Chariot clashing blades with Enya's scissors, but we get a rather long scene of Polnareff getting stabbed through the tongue and forced to lick the toilet... which is kinda funny, but also sort of overly long.

Ultimately, despite Polnareff's starring role in here (and Hol Horse's brief attempt to aid the heroes against a common enemy), Jotaro's been suspicious all day long, and tells Enya that he never said his full name out loud, instructed everyone to not say his name, and has written his name under a pseudonym. It's a neat bit as Enya ends up being in control to being the prey, we get a glorious ORA ORA ORA scene against the zombies... and Jotaro just ends the fight by... inhaling the entire Justice stand? Which takes out Enya alongside it? That feels a bit of a cop-out, honestly.

Overall, while the setup's pretty great, especially episode 14 with its creepy vibes, the execution once the cat's out of the bag isn't that special and Enya doesn't even do all that much with her marionette powers. Couldn't they had Jotaro forced to fight the puppeteer'd Polnareff and Hol Horse? Ultimately the episode ends with Enya as a hostage and Hol Horse escaping by stealing the Crusaders' car. It's an alright sequence, but for all the buildup Enya has throughout Stardust Crusaders she certainly doesn't end up feeling that formidable as an opponent.