JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E16 Review: Meteor Impact

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 16: The Secret of Guard Westwood

It actually is kind of a nice experience watching this episode because I genuinely 100% forgot about the Planet Waves Stand entirely. I remember the Survivor arc, I remember some of the Stands that we're going to see after this, but I genuinely forgot that Jolyne fought Planet Waves, and it's a neat experience seeing this fight play out. 

Despite the promise of a huge battle royale, the only ones fighting are generic prisoners in the background while Pucci's promised 'four Stand users' are just hanging out waiting for their turn. Instead, Guard Westwood, who is completely enraged by the effects of Survivor, is taking center stage while fighting Jolyne, ranting about violence and being the strongest and admiring the strong and weak points of Jolyne's muscles. It doesn't really make Westwood particularly memorable, and while the anime did assign some dialogue of some generic guards to Westwood in earlier episodes, it's not enough to make him a memorable character, I'm afraid. 

And while Survivor is supposed to be affecting Jolyne and she does state how she's enraged and stuff, she ends up defaulting to her regular demeanour pretty quickly. There are some interesting grappling moves between Westwood and Jolyne (including the bit with the jacket), which rather nicely hints to the reveal that Westwood is also a Stand user, able to see Stone Free's strings. The fight between Westwood and Jolyne is punctuated as Jolyne gets brutally hit several times by an unknown projectile, blowing holes in her limbs... while Westwood is still way too deranged to really get a feel of what his Stand is. 

Jolyne looks at holes in the sky and somehow immediately figures out that Guard Westwood summons meteories from space as tiny projectiles. It admittedly is just a rather cool-flavoured version of the many ranged Stands we've seen throughout the various Stand-using enemies. There is a coolness factor in a power that summons meteorites from deep space, but it's also not particularly used in any interesting way since they are tiny. The little complication comes from how all the meteorites home in to Westwood and always disintegrate before they can hit Westwood, despite Jolyne's attempts to get Westwood to be hurt by his own Stand abilities.

There is a bit where Jolyne really should've killed or incapacitated Westwood when she stabs him in the ear with strings so hard that they appear in Westwood's eye and nose, and there really are points where Jolyne's strings probably could have broken limbs or incapacitated Westwood... we'll chalk it up to Survivor giving Westwood berserker strength, I guess. Ultimately, Westwood gets defeated by Jolyne using a boot to catch a meteor and lob it at Westwood's face, using kind of a loophole in Planet Waves' ability where while the meteor itself will disintegrate near Westwood, the boot-on-fire does not. 

There is a pretty badass shot of Jolyne's victory pose as she retracts Stone Free's strings onto herself, but ultimately this is just a rather simple 'fight a single straightforward Stand user', and I really do think that Planet Waves is a lot more impressive on paper than what it actually does on-screen. 

The episode does also have a couple extra scenes here and there that progresses the plot. Foo Fighters and Anasui fight their way through the guards with their respective Stands, and we get to see Dio's bone being taken by one of the prisoners in the midst of Jolyne and Westwood's fight. Overall, though, basically the entire episode is the fight against Westwood, and his personality and abilities are really nowhere as interesting as Sports Maxx or even Rang Wrangler had been respectively.

Random Notes:

• Planet Waves is a reference to the Bob Dylan album of the same name.
• One thing that the anime does is to make Planet Waves' musculature a lot more prominent with the colours. It makes Planet Waves' heart-shaped head a bit more obvious, and it does fit with Westwood's obsession at seeing his opponents' muscles. 
• The anime shortens the 'fun factoids' bit about Planet Waves and the specific angles and space aircrafts in regards to the way that the meteorites arrive through the atmosphere. Always sad to see these 'hey look I did research' bits to be shortened, but it is admittedly not too relevant in this case to understand Planet Waves' ability. 
• I really do love the little detail of Diver Down 'diving' into the wall and then sticking out random limbs for Anasui to use as ladders to climb. 
• I do find the whole "the only weakness of this hold is that you can grba my balls! But I have a countermeasure for that, too!" the sort of absurd dialogue I'd expect from JoJo.