JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo S04E26 Review: Don Gollum

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Golden Wind, Season 4, Episode 26: A Little Story From The Past - My Name is Doppio

This is an interesting little move, to move the Boss's backstory relatively earlier. Vento Aureo's anime has been doing this for a lot of our main cast members, taking the flashbacks that they have in later parts of the manga and moving them forwards, and for the most part it's been done right and allows us to have a more accurate grasp about who these characters are as people as opposed to just seeing their character quirks and not much else. But I'm not quite sure how well this works with the revelation of the Boss's unique... physiology, I guess. It has been one of my biggest complaints how the Boss has always been one of the worst-written villains in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure due to how hands-off he has been, and the random exposition dump near the end when he finally becomes prominent hasn't been enough. But... eh, I digress. This episode, for what it's worth, is pretty charming.

Anyway, we go through the pretty interesting backstory given about the Boss in Summer 1965 as we enter a brief mini-arc where we sort of focus a lot more about the Boss. We learn that he was born to a pregnant woman from Sardinia who's stuck in a woman-only prison on a remote island, under very mysterious circumstances. It's all creepy and weird how she seemingly got pregnant within what looks like a day, and without any seeming contact with a man... and the baby is open-eyed, not crying, and thus begins a little story time of whatever the fuck was going on with Doppio/The Boss. None of these oddities are explained in the future. Not where he specifically comes from, not the circumstances of how the multiple personas develop, and not the whole weird bit with the mother.

And then we skip to when the baby is now a boy, adopted by a local priest in Sardinia, and that was where he met someone who clearly is Trish's mother. It's... it's neat, we get a little callback to the sparkling water line, but I do feel like these flashback scenes are just sort of mostly flat and just there to illustrate the events that happens. Of course, turns out that the boy, who I'm calling Doppio from now on, ends up burning a chunk of the village when the priest founds the very creepy and unexplained body of the boy's mother being shoved into the floorboards of the church.

And then we cut away to present-day Sardinia, where we are introduced to the pink-haired boy who's clearly the same socially-awkward boy from the flashbacks, and he's grown up and lanky, and after a weird sequence where he saves a kid from a truck (which is honestly a bit of a scene that doesn't add much) ends up talking to a fortune teller, who looks a bit like Felix Faust from DC comics. The fortune teller is apparently pretty smart, and quickly points out that the pink-haired man, Doppio, has "two separate lives" and takes advantage of his secret... and that he is looking for his daughter who was born 15 years ago. The fortune teller quickly notes just how bizarre this is for someone who looks so young, but gets so frantic and even wants to pay Doppio out of his professional curiosity.

And this is where the revelation is shown, as Doppio physically transforms into the Boss, complete with King Crimson's deep voice rom earlier on in the series, and chokes the fortune teller to death, complete with a pretty hilariously brutal sequence where he rips off the fortune teller's arm and swaps the palm he's reading with the fortune teller's own arm. It's the huge revelation that apparently the Boss is hiding inside this body, sort of like the Hulk, where there are two personalities hiding in one body and actual physical changes occur.

Which... which is a neat little gimmick to use on a character, as much as I am rankled by yet another fictional depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder that over-dramatizes the symptoms of the poorly-defined disease.

Anyway, we get to see Doppio interact with a taxi driver, who clearly wants to swindle him, and it's very interesting to see how genuinely nebbish and anti-conflict Doppio is, being bullied by a random taxi driver... and then he starts making his own bring-linglingling phone sound effect, and ends up doing this whole schizophrenic skit as he uses the taxi's car ornament as a 'phone' and talks to the Boss. This freaks out the taxi driver, who leaves (although he has the decency to throw Doppio's luggage out)... and as the Boss establishes that they have arrived at the place in the plot-relevant photo... the Boss also tells Doppio that he's being watched.

It's just such a shame that the re-ordering of the scenes makes it pretty damn obvious after the fortune teller scene that Doppio and the Boss are two personalities inhabiting the same body, and I really thought that the manga at least played Doppio up a bit more, making it a bit more ambiguous if Doppio was actually the Boss, or if he's just a very high-ranking underling or whatever. This episode basically makes it clear due to a bit of a re-ordering of the flashbacks from later chapters. A bit of a shame, but considering how many people in the fandom were apparently confused about the whole Doppio/Boss thing, it's understandable.

The one watching Doppio is Risotto Nero, the final member of La Squadra Esecuzioni, whose ability is a mystery even to the Boss. It's essentially a Doppio-centric arc as he goes through the same sort of "figure out the enemy's Stand powers" fight that we've seen so many times in JoJo... and it's definitely an interesting thing that we're not given a similar arc with our heroes discovering the Boss/Doppio dual identity thing. We get a glorious JoJo pose from Risotto as he emerges (apparently he has some invisibility powers) and demands that Doppio show an envelope -- which contains the all-important photograph -- to him. Fortunately for Doppio, the actual photograph ends up sticking onto the blood on Doppio's shoe, and Risotto is about to leave Doppio alone because "his fear is authentic".

But then Narancia's Aerosmith suddenly buzzes around the area, and Risotto quickly realizes that Bucciarati's group is here... and establishes Doppio as a Stand user since he reacts to the noise of Aerosmith. Risotto briefly notes the contradiction of Doppio clearly being part of the Boss's inner circle, but he's kind of a pussy...

And in one of the most brutal and awesome scenes in JoJo, Doppio suddenly vomits out blood... and razor blades. And then has needles grow out from the space inside his mouth and stab out of his face. As Doppio scrambles away from Risotto, he picks up a 'phone', this time a random frog... and the Boss tells Doppio to use the 'portion of his Stand' that he's given to Doppio.

So it's definitely a pretty interesting take, again, that Doppio seems completely unaware that he and the Boss share the same body, that he 'takes instructions' through what's essentially auditory hallucinations, and while the Boss persona can take over at any time, it's not something he can do at a whim. The fact that the episode ends with a very interesting villain-on-villain action scene is also something that I don't believe we've ever really had in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure too much, with any of the fights that have two non-heroic characters fighting each other almost always having one that's slightly more sympathetic.

Overall, I'll share my thoughts about the handling of the Boss/Doppio/King Crimson as we learn more about the character, because while the concept is definitely an interesting one, I've always felt like the execution is sort of lackluster in what would otherwise be one of the best Parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

The JoJo Playlist: 

• "Doppio" is the word for double in Italian.