JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E07-08 Review: Plankton

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 5], Episodes 7-8: There's Six of Us / Foo Fighters

Hell yeah Foo Fighters. 

I've always loved Foo Fighters. Conceptually, F.F. might be one of the weirdest characters in all of JoJo. Or, well, maybe not as weird as the sentient street, but they're pretty up there. This two-parter arc is also important not just because it introduces a new character, but it's also the first proper team-up between Jolyne and Ermes. Honestly, comparing Part VI to Part III, it's really stark just how compressed Part VI's arcs -- at least at this point in the story -- is. We could've very easily just had a Jolyne/Ermes team-up against an enemy, before introducing the fourth member of our little group of allies, but here we are. 

After a bit of a recap between Jolyne, Ermes and Emporio, our heroes basiaclly deduce the little observation Ermes makes in the fight against Thunder McQueen that he was seemingly brought back to life after having his Stand inserted back to him. 

Meanwhile, a bunch of guards get murdered in a warehouse near a swamp, which ends up creating a search party. Jolyne (and eventually Ermes) ends up volunteering to join the search party outside, but Jolyne has a plan -- she realizes from McQueen's discs that the Discs might be hidden outside of the prison buildings, and specifically a tractor shed. Of course, this being Green Dolphin Street Prison, the wardens set up an utterly psychotic Suicide-Squad-style explosive bombs that will detonate if the volunteers stray more than 50 meters from the guard supervising them. 

A good chunk of episode 7 is just the mystery and the tension of the situation, which I really did enjoy. It later turns into a murder mystery, with Jolyne and Ermes having to figure out who among the prisoners actually didn't 'show up' with the rest of the group when there ends up being one extra prisoner. As the audience, we're obviously not paying all that much attention to the background characters, and this batch are pretty generic enough especially by JoJo character design standards. And then the guard gets killed and his motorcycle tossed into the swamp, and suddenly it turns out to be a horror-murder-mystery. 

We do get a pretty cool sequence of Ermes and Jolyne accusing some of the other prisoners and thinking up of reasons why certain members of the group couldn't have been the culprit. Ermes ends up being attacked by some slimy goop within a bucket, seeing a bunch of planktons multiplying and being able to manipulate the murky waters around them. Jolyne uses some net-walking to save Ermes and while they manage to seemingly fight off the monstrous Stand-looking creature with a fun combination of her powers... but who among the prisoners is the controller?

While Stardust Crusaders' portion of the anime is faulted by extending some arcs into two-parters when they didn't need to be, I felt like 'Foo Fighters' really works well as a two-parter. The dread and mystery set up in episode 7 is continued in episode 8 in a typical 'where is the Sutando tsukai', and our heroes have to figure out who's lying when they said that other prisoners received a wound around the same time that the Stand-creature got injured. In one of my favourite moments from this part, Jolyne just shrugs, and ORA ORA ORA's everyone. Turns out that her solution turns out to be pretty fortuitous, since Foo Fighters isn't actually a person with a Stand, but a colony of plankton that is also a Stand. 

The majority of episode 8 ends up being just the fight against Foo Fighters, and what an utter creep of an enemy they (that's the pronoun you'd use for a colony of sentient beings, right?) are this early on! F.F. has apparently killed all the other prisoners and has been puppeteering all their bodies, and we quickly get a bit of an explanation that it was brought to life by Whitesnake, and tasked to protect the tractor from enemies. Our heroes also quickly realize that Foo Fighters' power is determined by water, since it needs to use the water of either the swamp or those from the corpses of their victims to move around. Oh, and it can kind of split itself up into smaller Stand-beings, which is pretty cool for a multi-location fight against Jolyne and Ermes. There's a neat case of multiple items in the battlefield being important as well, since everyone is fighting over the disc-tractor, but Ermes and Jolyne need to remain within 50 meters of the guard's corpse that F.F. is carrying away. 

There's a cool bit where Foo Fighters needs water to even exist, so we get pretty interesting imagery as Ermes uses Kiss to duplicate a desiccated corpse to dehydrate F.F.; or Jolyne using flour to force F.F. to solidify. Admittedly Jolyne somehow being able to remotely drive the tractor with her strings is kind of a bit of a cop-out, but she wouldn't be a main JoJo if her ability doesn't do something bullshit every now and then. F.F., in their single-mindedness to protect the tractor, ends up almost self-destructing when they lose moisture to the terrain... but then Jolyne realizes that Foo Fighters isn't even allied with Whitesnake, and is just guarding the discs for their own sake, and pours some water on the plankton-colony. 

It's... it's a bit of an oddity, since Foo Fighters actually did go around murdering the guards and the prisoners in this episode, but F.F. is such a bizarre life-form that I am inclined to follow Jolyne's lead and just shrug. I mean, if nothing else, F.F. is one of my favourite secondary characters in all of JoJo. 

The remaining parts of episode 8 is just establishing how F.F. will interact with the rest of the group -- they enter Atroe's body and takes on her form (and memory), and while they still do some stupid things like lick up spilled water on the ground, Foo Fighters ends up essentially swearing loyalty to Jolyne and Ermes. We also learn that apparently bodies will reject discs that are incompatible, and the tractor stores discs that Whitesnake's user is unable to use. Jolyne ends up finding Star Platinum (they smuggle it into the prison inside F.F.'s non-human body), but Jotaro's memory disc isn't around. A pretty exciting two-parter, I think, but I did feel like Stone Ocean has a pretty great ratio of action to plot development. 

The final scene of episode 8 also gives us the first appearance of Whitesnake's user, Father Enrico Pucci, who slowly investigates the warehouse and assumes that F.F. has been slain. An interesting way to introduce him, since Pucci isn't a character that the audience already knows of beforehand.

Random Notes:

• Foo Fighters, of course, is named after the rock band of the same name. Fittingly, one of their better-known songs is The Pretender. The prisoner that they take the identity of is Atroe, named after the Italian fashion band Etro. Enrico Pucci's name is a combination of fashion designers Enrico Coveri and Emilio Pucci. 
• Seriously, though, what a shit way of trying to ask for prisoners. I guess the wardens are honest that the prisoners will be doing this for no real pay, but still, it's a miracle anyone but Jolyne and Ermes even volunteered.
• It was definitely a surprise when I read this part of the story in the manga for the first time, but F.F. is plastered all over the opening next to Jolyne and Ermes... which would probably surprise the people discovering this story for the first time via the anime, since Atroe actually isn't important at all. 
• Loccobarrocoo, that lunatic warden, gets into a pretty fun wacky skit with his puppets in order to illustrate the crocodiles eating the guards. 
• There's a pretty long sequence in episode 7 of Jolyne preventing Ermes from falling into crocodile shit thanks to the machinations of the jackass guard. It's completely unnecessary but I did really like it. 
• We get a typical JoJo monologue from Foo Fighters about how intellect having existing before the Big Bang, and how all life has the potential to develop intellect. Google tells me this is attributed to Fred Hoyle. 
• I'm not sure why the guards would buy the "a crocodile killed everyone" explanation, but I guess F.F. could make the wounds match.