JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E13 Review: Invisible Dead Animals

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 5], Episode 13: Kiss of Love and Revenge, Part 1

It's been some time since I talked about JoJo reviews, huh? That's really the fault of the bizarre decision to split the decision into three parts (which makes sense from a production standpoint)... and then toss everything out in batches in Netflix. I really do think that this really ended up killing the momentum and the hype of the show. Splitting the season to multiple 'cours' as they call it is obviously standard practice nowadays, but I really didn't realize that Stone Ocean's next halves had shown up on Netflix, let alone that this happened twice already.

Anyway, I haven't really done a proper 'episode' review for either anime or TV since... shit, She-Hulk or something? Most of my material has been seasonal reviews thanks to the lack of time I have. But since I'm taking my time going through Stone Ocean, this show's going to be neat enough to be something I can use as scheduled articles for the blog, so to speak. 

Anyway!

The previous 'cour' ended at the cliffhanger where Father Pucci has started to act a bit openly, and we also get the huge cliffhanger revolving around Kujo Jotaro's discs being stolen. This episode starts off with a bit of a rather confusing chronology that I don't think is portrayed the best, where we jump forwards in time to see Jolyne being dragged to the Ultra Security House Unit, after being involved in an altercation with a dead woman. We see Pucci having a flashback to his totally gay time lounging around with Dio Brando, talking about souls and reaching heaven and the general ominousness of his plans.

And then we get to the "Kiss of Love and Revenge" two-parter story, and... again, it's not terribly done, it's just a little bit jarring. We then cut to Ermes, the primary focus of a lot of the story. After skipping out on a huge chunk of the previous mid-season finale, it's neat to give Ermes a bit more backstory since she's the secondary protagonist of this Part. We get the revelation that Ermes has been stalking a man called Sports Maxx, seeing him talking to Father Pucci with that brief, disturbing scene where he touches a flower and it gets covered in maggots. 

Jolyne and Foo Fighters are lining up to get food in the cafeteria, and F.F. is basically doing the dorkiest thing ever. I really do like F.F. and find her (them?) to be a better deuteragonist than any of Jolyne's other allies, and scenes like this are pretty fun. F.F. tries to do the opposite of what Atroe (her piloted corpse's original identity) would do, leading to the argument of what the opposite of beef in, and somehow causing a huge argument when F.F. allows everyone to cut the line in front of her. F.F. then drops some exposition, telling Jolyne about how Ermes has been following a particular man in the prison... including the time when the rest of the cast had been fighting in the courtyard. We get a fun little scene where they buy information from Gwess, and little moments where they interact with characters from earlier in the Part is really something that makes the Green Dolphin Prison come a live a bit more. 

(This Gwess scene, by the way, is entirely original to the anime. In the manga, F.F. explains everything and it's a great change. It doesn't make sense that plankton-hivemind girl is particularly invested in researching history so extensively. It also brings in the neat 'information and resources are crucial' vibe of the prison that gets lost as the series goes on.)

Ermes, meanwhile, has been stalking Sports Maxx, and I do love the typical JoJo detail of actually showing the many habits that Sports Maxx does. Going to the graveyard to tend to the tombs of his fellow gangsters, working on taxidermy animals... and then Ermes gets confronted by Jolyne and F.F. We get to see a flashback about Ermes' life, where she and her older sister Gloria lost their parents. Gloria, a fair bit older than Ermes, acts as the parental figure in their life, but like a typical teenager Ermes ends up running away from home after an argument on whether she would go to college or help run the family business. In the process, Gloria accidentally stumbles upon Sports Maxx, a mobster, killing a man -- in a disturbingly brutal way where he forces the man to bite a piece of wood 'the way a baby would suck' before kicking his head in. Gloria was willing to keep her mouth shut... until she realizes that Sports Maxx saw little Ermes running around, ending up calling the police as a witness.

...and just like what you would expect, the mob ends up killing Gloria by drownign her in a river, to prevent her from coming out as a witness against Sports Maxx. Maxx instead gets sent to prison for a measly five years instead of for life. Pretty great backstory, and while not the most original, Ermes has otherwise been a pretty one-note sassy character and seeing her backstory does end up making her feel more interesting. 

We cut back to the present day, and Ermes leaves behind a photograph of Gloria on a pipe for Sports Maxx to find. Ermes attacks Maxx at this point, combining two pipes at once and squishing Sports Maxx into the water pipes with the power of Kiss. It's a rather brutal moment because there was a point when Sports Maxx was looking out of the fracture in the pipe before Ermes comes up to gloat and fully seal the pipe... but can you really say that he doesn't deserve it?

Sports Maxx then summons something called 'Limp Bizkit', and as expected, that is the Stand for this arc. The items around the creepy taxidermy bird in Sports Maxx's little location end up breaking, and then Ermes gets attacked by an invisible bird. It takes a while for Ermes to even realize what's happening, and she loses a finger in the attack. Ermes uses Kiss to duplicate her jacket, wrap it around the bird and bash it -- the act causing the taxidermy bird to break as well. 

Realizing that she's dealing with a Stand, Ermes goes around to try and investigate Sports Maxx (still trapped and dying in that pipe) when something far bigger starts to move... and Ermes realizes that she's looking at a stuffed alligator. Ermes manages to hang on the ceiling while the invisible ghost gator rampages around, and we get her delightfully trying to explain to Jolyne and F.F. in a panic. F.F. ends up going through the unfortunate "Piccolo Syndrome" where the non-human with regenerative powers gets brutalized, and the alligator tears her leg off and chews on it. The episode ends with Jolyne splashing the gator with F.F.'s blood, painting the invisible gator red and giving us a rather impressive visual image of a gator made up of blood. 

Random Notes:

• Sports Maxx is named after the Max Mara brand, Sportmax.
• That guard that escorts Jolyne to solitary has the bizarre donut-barnacle hairdo that Giorno has, except way more than Giorno. it's more than a bit disturbing. 
• THE OPPOSITE OF PORK IS SALMON!
• We mentioned alligators before in the Foo Fighters arc, which is probably where that taxidermy model came from!
• It's a clever way of also reusing character models, but some of the generic prisoners in the cafeteria scene are changed to the bullies Jolyne met in the earlier episodes, while the generic guards escorting Jolyne to solitary confinement are now the guards affected by Survivor later on. 
• Speaking of other JoJo material, I haven't really been caught up with Part IX, The JoJoLands, but I do like what I see. I did think Jojolion did run a bit too long compared to its predecessors (and ended up being a much nicer reading experience to binge-read), so we'll see if JoJoLands will end up going through the same.