JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E39 Review: Repeating to the Sound of the Beat

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episode 39: Goodbye, Morioh Town, the Golden Heart

It's really interesting how much of this final episode still revolved around Kira himself and the conclusion of the fight against him. After all, in all previous parts, the final episode tended to be more of an 'epilogue', even with the detached Dio vampire head in Phantom Blood. After the utter beatdown Kira suffered at the end of the previous episode, though, it's clearly meant to imply that it was the end of this villain, especially when Hayato spends near damn a minute ranting about the heart of justice or some shit.

However, fire engines and ambulances show up (we actually hear them in the previous episode), causing Kira to immediately grab onto a paramedic and asking for her help -- essentially taking a hostage. And while I call bullshit on it, they at least attempted to handwave why Jotaro can't use Star Platinum to stop time because he's still too far away. No excuse, though, for all five combatants there to just stand there jaws agape like goddamn morons as Kira monologues for several minutes, hostage or no hostage.

Kira gets this creepy monologue as he rubs the paramedic's hand, and talks about his origin story -- how he, apparently, got a goddamned erection when he saw a picture of Mona Lisa, and had a cutaway of the picture's hands framed in his room and I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. You know, "bizarre" is in the god damned title of this series. Sometimes it means superpowers that manifest in unpredictable and insane ways. Sometimes it means some dude that gets an erection when faced with Renaissance paintings.

Of course, Jotaro, Josuke, and all of you there -- any of you could've, y'know, sprinted while Kira was waxing eulogies about having a boner while looking at hands. Just saying.

And then in a pretty awesomely-animated scene, Kira activates Killer Queen, puts Bites the Dust into the paramedic's eyes (apparently Bites the Dust can only 'infect' non-Stand-users) and then we get this massive explosion as space dust wraps around Kira and he's sucked into this psychedelic set of bubbles, galaxies, explosions and whatnot as he apparently shows up back in the morning, uninjured, and he just does this mighty laugh. HAHAHA!

And then... and then a bunch of birds pass through Kira, he gets confused as he realizes his watch is still broken, and he's in a different street than the one that he fought in. (Of course, attentive users would know exactly where Kira ended up) Also, a neat, subtle detail is that even after the moment that Bites the Dust seemingly activates, Kira still has his slicked-back white-and-black hair which he didn't get until partway through the morning of July 16th.

And then Reimi shows up, telling Kira that, of course, he's already dead.

Apparently that sequence with Kira getting sucked into the void of time was just a hallucination -- and it's just a short little sequence, so I'll forgive the little troll-y surprise. Apparently, in the real timeline, right after Kira tries to activate Bites the Dust, Koichi uses Echoes to slam Kira's hand to the ground. We also get a fun little S.H.I.T! from Echoes, which is always welcome.

And then Jotaro activates Star Platinum: The World, unleashing a glorious ORAAAAAAAAA as we get a repeat of Stardust Crusaders' musical riffs and Jotaro unleashes an ORA ORA ORA barrage that fucks up Kira's right arm.

And then Kira gets thrown backwards... and, surprisingly, neither Jotaro nor Josuke nor Okuyasu nor Koichi nor Rohan got to "get the kill", because Kira falls into the pathway of a god damned ambulance. It genuinely sort of comes out of nowhere, but I guess it's kind of fitting that Kira's ultimate death basically ends up out of a spot of bad luck after emphasizing on how much luck favours him? We don't actually get to see the grisly aftermath of Kira's face being ripped off and unidentifiable as Kawajiri Kosaku, but the panicking paramedics do know that the man is called "Kira Yoshikage", because Kira did mention his name in the monologue that he said to the doctor. Everyone is horrified, and Rohan notes that this is technically the best outcome since there's no way that Kira is ever going to be brought to court. (That ambulance driver probably would be brought to court, though, poor fella)


After delivering all of this, Reimi finally reveals her identity as Kira's very first murder -- the one he committed before he developed his "steal a hand and act out a civilian life" modus operandi thing. But then Kira realizes that Reimi's trying to get him to turn around, and apparently Kira already knows about the alley from his ghost-dad.

And in a pretty interesting bit Kira begins choking Reimi as his face turns back into the original blonde Kira. Honestly, while reading this the first time, I completely bought that Kira would honestly show up somewhere down the line as a ghostly antagonist. After all, Dio did show up in a subsequent part. But then the goodest boy of all Arnold, shows up and jumps out of the alleys, and rips off Kira's fucking hand, a pretty damn appropriate fate to deliver to the hand-fetish bastard.

And as Kira and Killer Queen get both ripped apart by the mysterious ghostly hands of the alley, Reimi tells Kira that she doesn't know where the hands will drag him to... but it's going to be somewhere where he definitely can't rest in peace, probably the most damning thing you can say to this psychopath who just wants to live in his own twisted definition of peace.

Honestly, it's a pretty awesome end. After all the shit that Kira's pulled throughout the series, and especially everything surrounding Hayato in the final arc, Kira just gets humiliated and beaten down so many times within these two episodes. Pretty appropriate and grisly fate to the serial killer.

And after all that, we get a rapid-fire epilogue. Reimi and Arnold ascends to heaven as their task on the mortal coil is done, and Rohan gets a bit of a tsundere moment. Most of the Stand-using cast show up (other than Yuya, I think, but he shows up later) to say farewell.

The episode also gets a pretty bittersweet, somber moment, noting that "Shigechi's parents will always wait for their son to return", and how Shinobu will likewise wait for "Kosaku" to return, showing just how many lives Kira left broken even after the threat of him is dealt with.

We then continue with the epilogue -- Jotaro and Joseph leave Morioh, with Joseph adopting Shizuka the invisible baby (is her name not said anywhere in the entire series?). Josuke does one final dick move by stealing Joseph's wallet as his 'allowance', and I think that scene where Joseph suddenly regains a bit of his Part 3 spirit is often used by many fans as evidence that Joseph might be faking part or all of his senility in Part 4... which, honestly, I wouldn't put past Joseph.

The epilogue for the others range from entertaining to a shrug. Apparently Jotaro got a doctorate in marine biology, because he wrote a thesis on a random starfish he saw in Morioh. Yukako and Koichi are dating. Okuyasu's adopted Stray Cat. We get a fun bit where they eat at Trussadi's, and we get a scene that seems to imply that Okuyasu's dad is cured... but nope, he's just shiny! That's a nice little fake-out, and the family's still happy.  Rohan's Pink Dark Boy returns back to serialization.We check in with Yuya, Hazamada and Tamami a bit. Mikitaka tells Superfly that, yes, the town of Morioh is that interesting. The final shot is just Josuke striking a JoJo pose as we pan out of this crazy noisy bizarre town.

Overall, Diamond is Unbreakable definitely ranks pretty highly on the list of my favourite parts of JoJo. Sure, it's got its fair share of criticisms, but a combination of an actively intriguing (and very hateable) villain, a distinct attempt to deliver a different tone to its predecessor, and attempt at actually using the side-characters effectively (even if it's sometimes at the expense of Josuke) and the first real part, in my opinion, that actually turned Stands to become insanely crazy and bizarre while not falling into the trap of being waaay to complex that some subsequent parts would have the problem of. It's been a gigantic blast watching through this, and the animation studio clearly has gotten a lot more comfortable in adapting the manga, like the awesome editing they did for the "July 15th" episode, something that I really wished Part 3's adaptation did a lot more of.

Been a gigantic blast, honestly! Next up... we go from a quirky small town in Japan to... Italian mobsters with impeccable fashion sense! Bevenuto in Italia!