JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S02E25-26 Review: Water Daredevil vs Dog Sandman

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, Episodes 25-26: Iggy's The Fool & N'doul's Divine Geb 

Ah, we're back with some JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and this time around it's the second half of the Stardust Crusaders part, specifically the "Battle in Egypt" arc. During the broadcast, the anime took around a five-month break between the first half of Stardust Crusaders and the Egypt episodes. And it's a hell of a two-parter to start us off!

We quickly set this up by introducing the final new member of the Stardust Crusaders part, Iggy! And a good chunk of the first episode ends up just being sort of fluff as we introduce this irate, extremely temperamental dog that noms on Polnareff's hair, bites everyone and refuses to move for anything other than "coffee-flavoured gum", which I'm pretty sure isn't something you should feed to a dog. Well, at least for the second leg of Stardust Crusaders we're going to have a little puppy buddy hanging around, which kinda-sorta makes up for all the dogs graphically killed, eviscerated and chopped up before this. Iggy is quickly shown to control the stand called "The Fool", which he uses in a little scuffle against Polnareff. And the Fool is kinda... bizarre, isn't it? A golden robot with feathers, a toothy beak, weird knobbly arms and two wheels for legs. Oh, and its power is controlling sand, and transforming into sand. Because... why not?

This is going to be Iggy's biggest spotlight for a while, though, because outside of this pair of episodes, Iggy's not going to do much in terms of battle until like the last three or four arcs.

The introduction sadly does take its sweet time, though, which I think actually makes for the sudden and brutal introduction of N'Doul all the more surprising. After a rare bit where the Speedwagon Foundation goons that Joseph apparently has unquestioningly obeying his every command gets a fair bit of screentime... and, of course, we find them dead and brutally massacred when the Crusaders come across the downed helicopter.

N'Doul is a pretty interesting, if flat, villain, and ends up feeling like a neat break after the previous couple of villains have been jeering people who tend to mock our heroes at every possible opportunity. N'Doul is calm, collected, and attacks our heroes from a distance. He's blind, and makes use of his superhuman senses to sense vibrations in the sand to track our heroes' movement as he attacks them with the long-distance stand Geb, which manifests in a tentacle-like hand made out of water, creepily introduced by slithering out of the mouth of one of the dead Speedwagon dudes.

The increasing panic in our heroes as they try to realize the nature of the enemy Stand is also pretty well-played, and there's a definite sense that N'Doul is in a different class compared to the more bumbling enemies we've seen before this, by the simple fact that N'Doul quickly learns and adapts when our heroes try to trick them -- Avdol's attempt to throw his many, many rings to make it look like footsteps is pretty well done, and N'Doul manages to actually claw out Kakyoin's eyes, as well as doing some work to wound Avdol.

The actual fight is pretty neat, with an uncooperative Iggy only wanting to get the fuck away from these strange people, displaying the fact that the Fool can actually convert into a hang-glider, while Jotaro ends up realizing that Iggy can actually sense where N'Doul is coming from. There's a pretty neat bit of tension as Jotaro hoists himself on Iggy and it's a race in understanding as Jotaro tries to figure out where N'Doul is, while N'Doul tries to figure out why the hell Jotaro and Iggy disappeared from his radar.


It's a pretty fun, classy enemy with N'Doul just being cocky enough to not be bland, but serious and confident enough to feel different from the vast majority of Stardust Crusaders' enemies. Iggy ends up being the comic relief of this episode and... I dunno. I like him because he's an asshole, I think? I also like this more scrappy, ugly-dog like Iggy a lot more than the far more cute-ified version of him that he'll morph into in a couple of episodes, but maybe that's because I really just like dogs?

Anyway, N'Doul's neat, and sets up the game plan of this arc, that their enemy are nine totally-unknown-to-Avdol Stands based on the Egyptian Gods (although Geb is the god of the earth, meaning that the attribution is about as nonsensical as the Tarot cards). And it would've been a badass cliffhanger to end on... if only the post-credits sequence didn't immediately spoil us that we're going to have the goddamn Oingo Boingo brothers next, which are the exact opposite of "threatening".

(That bit where the dude that the brothers met gets stabbed and thrown into a metal pole is a pretty sinister and awesome scene, though, I have to admit).

Overall, a pretty neat episode for sure!

The JoJo Playlist:

• Iggy is a pup named after the "Godfather of Punk", Iggy Pop, lead singer of the band the Stooges. Selected discography include Lust for Life, Passenger, Candy and the appropriate one for this, I Wanna Be Your Dog. The album called "The Idiot" also counts as possibly another reason why Iggy's Stand is called the Fool. 
• N'Doul (parsed as N'Dour in some translations) is named after Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour.
• The opening theme for the "Battle of Egypt" portion of Stardust Crusaders is "JoJo Sono Chi no Kioku, End of the World", which, while in my opinion not quite as energetic and catchy as Stand Proud, is still a fun piece. That "ORAORAORA" at the end isn't quite as hammy as it could've been, though, and End of the World is notable for one of the few times that "Star Platinum" is pronounced with Purachinamu instead of how the show pronounces it (Purachina)
• The ending song is another Western song, the pretty calming, wordless rhythmic 80's piece Last Train Home by the band Pat Metheny Group.