JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E13 Review: Baby Blues

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episode 13: We Picked Up Something Crazy

A bit of genuinely simpler episode this time around, and it's going to be a shorter review for me. Basically, the entirety of this episode deals with Josuke meeting with his missing-from-his-childhood dad, Joseph Joestar, who, at this point, is a scatterbrained senior citizen. And both the previous episodes and this one really show off just how conflicted Josuke is about Joseph, refusing to call him 'dad' or let him see Tomoko.

It's very, very interesting to take Joseph's role in all this, since he's acting senile for a huge chunk of the episode. We never actually have any proper monologue or whatever from Joseph, but those of us that remember Battle Tendency know that one of Joseph's original defining traits was how he believed that his father had abandoned him (when his father died due to the whole vampire business), and now he's actually being a neglectful father, intentional or not, to Josuke.

And after a misfortune when Joseph accidentally boards a wrong bus, the two of them end up meeting an invisible baby. Or rather, a baby that has became a Stand user. Initially, Josuke dismisses Joseph's claims that there's an invisible baby as the ramblings of a senile old man, but the two of them end up meeting the invisible baby and having to take care of her, including a hilarious (if overly long) gag of Joseph trying to buy baby supplies and is barraged with a whole lot of crazy alternate options and just buys one of each, unknowingly racking up an insane amount of expenses with Josuke's credit card -- a combination of Joseph's lack of savviness due to being rich and also not understanding dollar-to-yen comparisons. Oh, and we get a brief "OH MY GOD" from Joseph, although it's a lot less hammy compared to his Stardust Crusaders era.

We get some fun bits as Joseph and Josuke try to figure out how to change diapers, and later on put some makeup on the invisible baby's face. Things get predictably out of hand when the baby's Stand starts intensifying when she gets cranky, causing things around her to become invisible again... and then the baby stroller she's in rolls away into a lake -- where the water's apparently clear enough that the baby's invisibility field can't be seen. Joseph ends up cutting himself to have his blood bleed out and enter the lake, allowing them to retrieve the baby because Joseph "wants to look cool in front of his son".

And that ends up being how Josuke ends up getting some respect for Joseph -- he might still be an asshole who broke her mother's heart (although being a missing dad wasn't exactly Joseph's fault) but Joseph was still a good man. Other than the gigantic bill he spent with Josuke's heart.

It's a pretty light-hearted episode that definitely flows a lot better as a single episode of anime compared to how dragged-out it was in the manga (lasting nearly half of a volume, I think). The anime also adds a bunch of fun, extra scenes, including Josuke's star-shaped birthmark, a brief cameo by Kishibe Rohan receiving an envelope from Shueisha (the company behind Shonen Jump) and the "Morioh News" radio show noting about how some dude's girlfriend with a ruby ring went missing, definitely a reference to the hand that the still-unseen killer is holding.

Overall, it's a pretty mellow episode, honestly -- maybe Joseph and Josuke should've bonded in a higher-stakes episode, but this sort of slow burn and acceptance of their relationship is definitely another thing that I wished Stardust Crusaders had between Jotaro and Joseph.

The JoJo Playlist: 

• The baby's Stand, also not named in this episode (lots of unnamed Stands in Diamond is Unbreakable, huh?), is called Achtung Baby, based on an album by the band U2.