JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 24: The Ties that Bind JoJo
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| Kars has glorious hair. Clearly a superior being. |
Anyway, episode 24 has the sadistic Kars (who goes all ween weeeen weeeen and playing air guitar with Lisa Lisa's legs last episode) go through a very sadistic rope-tangling battle with Joseph, and it's... it's actually insanely silly. When ropes were used during the battle with ACDC a couple of episodes back on the pit of spikes it's a lot more believable that Jojo would have the chance to entangle them thanks to how he was jumping around and trash-talking ACDC all the while, but throughout the battle with Kars he was just standing still, and the revelation that he's been doing some rope tricks to tie up Kars, Lisa-Lisa and himself together is just a bit too hard to swallow, especially considering no hamon-manipulation is actually involved. It's one of the few times that Joseph's boasts actually feels like bullshit on the writer's part, and the relatively prolonged pacing during this leg of the fight makes it a bit of a dull sequence to watch.
Also making it dull is the constant flashbacking as Smokey explains to Speedwagon (both of whom already know this) that Lisa Lisa is actually Joseph's mother, the baby saved by Erina at the end of Part I, and was raised by Straizo and married George Joestar, the baby Erina is pregnant with. It's honestly a bit of backstory that really didn't need to be inserted at this point of all things, and just kind of ruin the pacing of an already tenuous sequence. George Joestar's story is interesting enough, with him uncovering the remnants of Dio's vampire army and being killed by it (George doesn't have hamon), and Lisa Lisa herself going on a one-woman rampage that paints her as an international criminal for killing George's killer in broad daylight, causing her to have to not raise Joseph. It has some definite parallels to the story of Caesar's father, but on the other hand it comes a bit too late in the story to really make it feel like it matters. Maybe if Joseph discovers this around the time that Caesar's backstory came up, it might have meant something, but here it's just Smokey and Speedwagon being the most inelegant introdumper ever.
Kars falls down onto the spikes and von Stroheim and the Speedwagon troops unleash UV beams upon him, but Kars apparently has stolen the Super Aja stone and placed it on the stone mask, something that is a lot more believable for him to have done off-screen as opposed to Joseph's rope tricks. It does mean that Kars goes through the ultimate transformation that he was searching for, which brings us to the next episode, which thankfully is a lot more interesting than this relatively weak one.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 25: Birth of a Super-Being
I've always been fond of Kars's transformation, how he just stands there, transforms his hand into a squirrel who proceeds to murder another squirrel, and then fly through von Stroheim's cyborg body and rips it apart, showing Kars's new mastery of all the cells in his body and showing how he is able to basically transform all his cells into anything. It does make him basically Beast Boy, but he does have all the powers that he originally has as a PIillar Man, so. The scene when the sun rises and Kars just stands in the sunlight while every single vampire gets turned into dust is pretty damn badass, too.
SEX: UNNECESSARY! Sadly the narrator doesn't quite read all the explanations to Kars's new body, but it's at least shown on-screen.
Joseph, meanwhile, pulls off a trick he did earlly on in the series, which is the 'run away like shit' trick. There is the rather unnecessarily-done sequence of Smokey running alongside Joseph and trying to tell him the oh-so-important revelation that Lisa Lisa is his mommy, something I felt was pretty inelegantly done and honestly pretty unnecessary. Thankfully, Jojo ditches Smoke and flies a plane, being chasded by Kars and his new bird wings, which shoot feathers that transform into piranhas. Say that again -- feather projectiles that turn into piranhas. Oh, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, you truly are bizarre. We get a badass moment with Stroheim (who stows away on the plane) and Joseph double-teaming Kars and trapping him on the plane as they slam it on a collision course unto a volcano.
The airborne battle is pretty tense, unlike the rope silliness from episode 24, and quite easily fills the aciton quota of the final battle. It perhaps isn't as well-done as Joseph and Caesar's individual fights against Wamuu, but then it's hard to top that fight.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 26: The Ascendant One
The final part of Battle Tendency involves a series of "Kars is dead! Wait, we're fucked!" plot twists, which thankfully didn't happen too many times that it becomes silly. Kars escapes from the volcano by making some weird bubble chitin shield thing, and reveals that he now knows how to use Hamon, by melding Joseph's leg and slicing off his arm.
We also get the perhaps unnecessarily long revelation that Kars was the inventor of the Stone Mask, and was a genius who proceeded to murder every single other Pillar Men alongside ACDC, before escaping with the two remaining babies who would become Santana and Wamuu. It does explain why Kars is so able to understand the plot device intimately, I guess? Kars himself is a rather generic 'mwahaha, I am an ultimate being, bow before me!' villain, but at least he seems to be enjoying himself.
The animation for this episode is actually pretty top-notch as well, looking absolutely gorgeous and befitting of a final episode.
Joseph's victory is partially poetic justice (he launches his severed arm at Kars, just like Wamuu did in their final battle) and partially deus ex machina (he uses the plot device, the Super Aja, to deflect the blast and cause the volcano to explode), but at least Joseph has one last laugh on Kars, telling him that, yes, the volcano blasting the chunk of rock they're on into space is totally part of his plans. Joseph manages to escape, whereas the velocity of the rock causes Kars to fly into space, freezing and unable to properly adapt, he just flies through space aimlessly. It's a pretty horrifying end as the narration goes through detail as to how Kars's brain shuts down entirely as he is trapped, floating through space, while still conscious.
The epilogue is a bit longer than it probably should, but eh. It works. Joseph marries bland love interest Suzie Q, shows up at his own funeral to surprise everyone (hey, with Jonathan dead at the end of Part 1, it wouldn't be too surprising if Joseph died at the end of this one), we get the revelation of how Speedwagon, Erina and von Stroheim eventually died of old age (with one last SEKAIII ICHIIII from Stroheim), Smokey becomes president... and then we skip forwards several decades to an older Joseph Joestar and his walkman, walking through a Japanese airport and being a dick to a Japanese man, ranting about his Japanese son-in-law. Joseph grew to become a grouchy old man, and, well, while a bit bizarre, it does set up the stage for Part 3 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, widely touted to be the best part of the multi-part saga of the Joestar families. Battle Tendency does end up floundering a bit towards the end, but it was reasonably still well-paced and had a lot of great moments and some of the best antagonists in Stroheim and Wamuu, as well as some of the most thrilling action scenes and an iconic death in regards to Ceasar Zeppeli. We'll see if we ever get to do Stardust Crusaders, but it's a great jumping-in point regardless.
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