JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S02E36-37 Review: Fighting Fate

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, Episodes 36-37: Hol Horse & Boingo, Pts. 1-2

One of the biggest criticisms that I have against Stardust Crusaders is how little main villain Dio actually does. Other than an ominous scene every so often, and every other villain of the week referencing him, Dio himself never actually becomes relevant until the final couple of arcs, other than the odd ominous scene every now and then, which has been practically absent since Enya died so many episodes ago. This is in stark, stark contrast to practically the main villain of every other JoJo Part except maybe the currently-running Part VIII. Even villains that are introduced relatively late in the story's run tended to be doing something, whereas Dio is just 'resting' and waiting for his stolen Jonathan Joestar body to fully acclimatize.

That said, though, as much as Dio himself ended up being mostly a non-presence, he does make what little scenes he got really, really work. After Stardust Crusaders sort of dropped the whole idea of flesh buds controlling Dio's minions, we're expected to believe that all of the minions that Dio has been siccing non-stop onto our heroes follow him either because of their god-worship of Dio (characters like Enya and N'Dour, particularly) or out of fear (like D'Arby, last episode, who was pretty scared of Dio). This episode's first sequence ends up exploring inarguably Stardust Crusaders' longest-running recurring villain, Hol Horse, as he comes face-to-face with Dio.

And Hol Horse's delivery of his report while trying to psych himself up that Dio is 'just a man', and that he's going to side with whichever side is the strongest, is pretty interesting, and I really do like the tension as Hol Horse initially psyches himself up to shoot Dio in the head for insulting him one time too many and threatening to kill him if he failed him again... and then Dio vanishes, and appears behind Hol Horse without disturbing any of the cobwebs behind him, implying some teleportation-esque ability (I'm not going to spoil it for any first-time viewers), and basically scaring the bejeezus out of Hol Horse by showing that all his talk about being "weak" is just in comparison to how he expects himself to be eventually. 

This display of sheer power could perhaps be scripted a little better, but it is kind of effective to really hammer home Hol Horse resigned "yeah, okay, Lord Dio, I'll follow you" mentality for a good chunk of the episode.

And... and the rest of the two-parter ends up being a non-stop comedic runthrough as we bring back one of the more creative stands in Boingo's future-predicting manga, Thoth. Similar to the original Oingo/Boingo storyline, it's mostly a villain-centric episode and it's mostly carried by Hol Horse, honestly, with Boingo just repeating the same "100%, 100% accurate!" line after a brief bit of dealing with his apparent insecurity without his brother. 

And Thoth ends up being far more troll-y than usual, basically telling Hol Horse to stick his fingers up Polnareff's nose during the eventual scuffle, and the subsequent conflict ends up being just whether Hol Horse should or should not trust the goddamn manga. It's... it's a bit played out, honestly, and running across two episodes ended up stretching the sequence far longer than it deserves. I'm genuinely not sure if it needed to be paced this slowly, especially since the earlier Boingo/Oingo episode was far, far better-paced at a single episode. Makes me wonder if the Hol Horse/Dio sequence wouldn't be better served shuffled away as a bonus scene in another episode that could've been trimmed, and to have this two-parter be condensed into a single one. 

The 'twist' that Hol Horse's bullets somehow spun around and tore through the blood splatters of the manga pages felt pretty ass-pull-y, too, as a way for Thoth's revelations to come true. I dunno. This episode was funny at times, but the concept and the execution of the concept definitely overstayed its welcome by the time we got to the climax of Hol Horse, Boingo and the pipes. It's a fun idea, to have the villains be sympathetic and struggle to accomplish something, but all it ended up being is an overly-long gag, and the Dio/Hol Horse confrontation doesn't even get a real payoff since Hol Horse is just hospitalized and quite literally written out .

Still, this does serve as a fun little last hurrah for some of the Part's more charming side villains, but the execution isn't quite as well-done as I would've liked. From this point on it's full-on action as we run down the remaining members of the "Egypt Nine Glory Gods", as the wiki calls them, before finally facing off against Dio. Unless I'm mis-remembering something, we have four major fights left. 

The JoJo Playlist:

• As with the Boingo/Oingo episode, this episode features a unique Hol Horse/Boingo ending in Boingo's weird manga style. 
• A bit of a note -- the scene of Hol Horse confronting Dio actually took place between the Alessi and D'Arby arcs in the manga, but is moved here instead.