JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E17 Review: The Ghost of Dogs Past

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episode 17: Kishibe Rohan's Bizarre Adventure

I remembered how when I first read this sequence of chapters in the manga how utterly underwhelmed I was with the story up until the last couple of pages. It felt like another filler one-shot "random Stand user in Morioh Town" until we get to the major plotlines of the fourth part, which is the whole bow-and-arrow thing. This felt like just a way to get our newest recurring character, Kishibe Rohan, squarely in the side of the angels (albeit a borderline-sociopathic bastard of an angel).

But man, what an utterly huge plot twist! We've been dealing with Stands and Stands and nothing other than Stands ever since Stardust Crusaders that it's actually a bit of a "whoa!" moment when I realized that the antagonist in this chapter doesn't even possess a Stand at all, and is just a bona fide ghost. And not even an antagonist per se, honestly.

We start off with Koichi meeting Rohan as they ponder a bit of a discrepancy between the maps of Morioh Town which doesn't show an alleyway they're facing, but when Rohan and Koichi start walking down the path, they just go around and around the same couple of series of houses and a newspaper dispenser with a dog turd, and it's clear that the segment of Morioh Town they're in isn't just thanks to bad mapmaking -- especially when Echoes can't even fly up into the sky.  Incidentally, this episode, I think, is the one that confirms that Koichi still has access to the cuter Act I version of Echoes.

Then they meet Reimi, and Rohan displays his own Stand upgrade -- Heaven's Door can now manifest as a proper Stand instead of just a passive power that Rohan has. In perhaps one of my favourite showcases of an 'evolving' Stand, Rohan still has to draw the Stand mid-air with his pen to make it manifest, which I think is one of the more novel ideas of Stand details.

Heaven's Door confirms that this Sugimoto Reimi girl is just a normal person, even if Rohan ends up getting a bit too excited as he reads out things like Reimi's measurements and shit. Reimi then tells Rohan and Koichi a story, which is basically the Licked Hand urban legend/campfire story (which I won't recount here)... and then reveals the fact that Reimi and her dog Arnold are actually killed in such a fashion.

Reimi then tells Koichi and Rohan that she's a friendly ghost that only some people (implied to be Stand users) can see, and that she's stuck in Morioh until her killer is caught... but she is unable to do anything since she's bound to that ghostly alleyway. She's been around for fifteen years, and she's seen a lot of dead people killed by her killer pass through that same alleyway.

Of course, all this lore-dump isn't just setup for the Killer, shaping up to be one of the main antagonists of this Part. We get the utterly unexplained phenomenon as Reimi brings Koichi and Rohan back to the world of the living... and gives them the cryptic warning of "whatever happens, don't turn around", and I do really love how the anime portrays it as some nondescript, unseen shadow trying to trick Koichi to turning bacckwards, even imitating Rohan's voice at one point before manifesting as these ghostly hands that reach out from the void and try to straight-up rip Koichi's soul out. It's delightfully creepy, and the fact that this is never explained as the work of any sort of Stand or whatever adds to the extra creepiness of the setting.

Rohan ends up saving the day by writing in "Koichi will be launched backwards at high speed" with Heaven's Door, and both Rohan and Koichi manage to escape the scary ghost alley... and then we get a neat moment of vulnerability from Rohan. We're told that Rohan used to live in Morioh when he was a child both in his original appearance and again in this episode. As Rohan investigates Reimi's murder, he found out that Reimi was his babysitter of sorts as a child, and during the day that the killer killed Reimi, she snuck Rohan out of a window, causing him to be the sole survivor of the massacre. It's a fun little detail that I thought worked well as a backstory for Rohan, as well as giving the otherwise apathetic asshole something to fight for.

However, it's clear that we're not going to breach the Killer just yet, because Rohan, Josuke and Okuyasu end up telling Koichi that it's sort of out of their jurisdiction and that they are better off letting the police handle a 'mere' serial killer.

And as Koichi walks down the street, he was nearly run down by a careless blonde driver in a purple suit... and the anime shows only the audience that the dude's name is Kira, and that he is the dude that was being crazy by playing house with the disembodied hand foreshadowed through several episodes in the anime. I think this is the acutal debut of Kira in the manga? The anime definitely did the right thing by foreshadowing Kira from a couple episodes ago, leading to a moment of "ohhh shit that's that dude" instead of the eyeroll I had with "of course the murderer is only introduced after we learn of him".

Overall, a deceptively simple standalone episode that ends up being one of the bigger lore-dumps of Diamond is Unbreakable, properly establishing Koichi and Rohan's friendship, and building up what is easily hands-down my favourite JJBA villain? Definitely a good episode, this one.