JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 18: Von Stroheim's Revenge
This episode's... way, way too long for what it did. Despite the title, the grand return of von Stroheim doesn't actually take place until the last two minutes of the episode. No, instead the majority of the episode is dealt with ACDC's brain and mass of vessels possessing Suzi Q and turning her into a psychotic abomination that's the definition of body horror. There's copious amounts of shipping material between Joseph and Suzi Q, basically ensuring that the audience knows that Joseph totally isn't gay for Caesar.
The episode also spends way too much time for the fanservice quotient of Lisa Lisa's bath, as well as Joseph's attempt to peek into said bath (though it did end up leading to him showing up in time to fight ACDC-Q). The voice-acting and animation for the ACDC-possessed Suzi Q is appropriately horrifying, with contorted limbs and black goop dropping everywhere and the overlayered voices of the two, but the rather crappy pacing and random bits like Joseph and Caesar spending like a half-minute arguing about peeking into women's bath while ACDC is just standing there in possession of their friend is just so oddly paced. They go through several versions of "kill me, but you kill this girl!" as ACDC apparently goes through some weird convoluted plan to, um, mail the Super Aja to Kars instead of actually using the Suzi Q host body to get the stone to Kars directly? And instead of actually trying to kill the Hamon warriors like he was initially trying to do, he goes through this convoluted plan of using the body to bar the door?
How is Suzi Q still alive with all that boiling blood pouring out of her? Joseph and Caesar knock ACDC out of Suzi Q's body with some positive-negative Hamon combination attack, which doesn't really make sense considering ACDC seems to actually rip a hole through Suzi's scalp as his brain leaps out. ACDC finally dies, burning in the sun to ashes, and Joseph makes this speech about how he respect ACDC as a warrior and for him doing all he can to finish his mission... dude, the man kind of fucked up royally and should've escaped with the stone wihtout going through all this.
Add the protracted farewell between Joseph and Suzi Q before they travel to the next location... at least we quickly get obviously-revived-Stroheim meeting with Joseph's crew. ACDC's plans went straight to the dumps as Stroheim recovers the Super Aja stone with minimal effort. Kars finally shows up to do something, and his first appearance is pretty badass, analyzing the room to look for heat signatures before manifesting an arm-sickle-blade and killing all the soldiers with a single strike. Next episode promises a Stroheim versus Kars fight which... which is honestly a bit of a disappointment.
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