JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo S04E18 Review: While My Guitar Gently Weeps

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, Season 4, Episode 18: Final Orders from the Boss

We covered a chunk of this episode in the previous review, but I do like the rather seamless buildup from the Melone fight to the Ghiaccio fight, with scenes interposed between this episode and the previous one of Ghiaccio slowly moving towards the scene of the train on his car, wanting to act as a backup. And Ghiaccio has a pretty fun voice (provided by the same voice actor as MHA's Bakugou) and we get him ranting on the phone about how he just doesn't understand some idioms. I'm not sure if the translation is accurate from the original Japanese dialogue, but the Crunchyroll version has him ranting about "take a leaf out of someone's book", because what the fuck is a leaf doing inside a book? He also has ridiculous cartoon-melon hair, which honestly makes him unable to really take him all that seriously. Of course, we get Melone being killed by way of deus ex serpentina, so it's Ghiaccio's turn to play villain of the two-parter. 

Also, while he's not as relevant in this episode, I also do like the brief scenes of the other member of the Execution Squad, Risotto Nero, who's acting as his backup and apparently hunting for a particular set of data and forcing a bunch of gangsters to restore data in a computer. 

But before that, we get to witness the titular 'final orders from the boss', which is apparently telling them to use Abbacchio's Moody Blues on one of the pieces of furniture within Coco Jumbo, and rewind 14 hours in order to access Pericolo's final message, who gives them their final orders before shooting himself in the head. It's a pretty brutal and obscure power-abusing way to hide that message, but, shit, it's a good thing Abbacchio wasn't more severely injured or killed in that Man in the Mirror fight, huh? I do like the little continuity nod to Pericolo's role as a caporegime, and we actually did see his dead body being inspected by the Execution Squad all the way back in episode 13.

The fight this time around takes place on the majestic highway of Ponte della Liberta, the road to Venice, and their target is a diskette (oh, the 90's) hidden within a lion statue. But then we get the sudden fog-up of the windows of the car they are in, and apparently things got so cold that apparently a chunk of Mista's finger gets stuck and gets ripped clean off in a pretty unnecessarily graphic manner. And it's Ghiaccio! His Stand, White Album, is a simple cold-generating Stand, but instead of generic anime ice beam blasts, Ghiaccio actually is far more static -- especially in his first fight, where he just stands on top of the car, encasing himself in ice, and spreading the cold throughout the entire car and intending to immobilize the entire car before going in for the kill. 


And we get some additional body horror of faces being stuck to windows and skins being ripped off, and Sex Pistols' bullets prove utterly ineffective against Ghiaccio's Stand. Throw in the fact that the brake is frozen by the Stand's effects, and the car they are in is just zooming along at breakneck speeds. Mista delivers this colourful JoJo-Facts(tm) speech of how no organisms can be born in minus 100 degrees Celsius, and this is the apparent weakness of Gold Experience -- he can't birth life in an unhospitable condition like this freezing wasteland.... even though the temperature is clearly still warm enough for the two of them to yak their mouths. And Giorno clearly had no problem bringing that antidote snake to life back in the Purple Haze arc, so... yeah.

We then get a pretty entertaining rant from Ghiaccio about pronouncing Paris as Pa-ree, but Venezia is called 'Venice' by the world, and he yells that they really should use the goddamn Italian name since it's an Italian city. Such a random non-sequitur rant, but an entertaining one. 

During this rant, Giorno uses Gold Experience to pick up bullets and hand them to Mista, who shoots the bullets which generate enough heat for Gold Experience to affect the bullets and transform them into plants that knock Ghiaccio off of the car roof. Again, apparently Mista's fingers are powerful enough to pull that trigger in the minus-100-degrees cold. Like, I'm not a huge fan of how they present the facts of the Stand's capabilities or whatever to us, and then just do something that is kind of in opposition to said fact. 

Of course, Ghiaccio would then reveal the true form of White Album, which is a Stand Armour! It wraps itself around Ghiaccio's body like some sort of wacky Tron armour, and Ghiaccio just fucking ice-skates after the car while turning the ground into frozen ice underneath his feet, and we get some genuinely well-done animation at this point, particularly when Ghiaccio uses White Album to freeze the exhaust from the car and skate up it. The armour, as Giorno finds out, is also pretty damn tough, enough to deflect both Sex Pistols' bullets and a Gold Experience punch. The episode ends in a bit of a cliffhanger as Giorno drives the goddamn car off the road and into the river... which honestly seems counter-intuitive against someone who can freeze things. 

Still, ultimately a pretty neat debut for another Stand user. Not much to really complain about beyond what I already said before. 

The JoJo Playlist:

• White Album is named after the iconic Beatles album, which contains some of their best-known songs like Blackbird, Helter Skelter, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, Why Don't We Do It In The Road and Martha My Dear, among many others.