JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 24: Jailbreak
Again, I will express that the buildup of showing Jolyne reacting in confusion to the effects of the power to be the strongest part of this enemy Stand. This episode also showcases a couple more fun moments, like Jolyne continually rewinding a movie because she keeps forgetting plot points established earlier, much to the frustration of the other prisoners there. After getting distracted by reading comics, Jolyne finally realizes that she needs to go to find Emporio. There's a cool moment where Jolyne reads a note on her hand to 'not trust anyone who looks at her hands', and she instantly ora-ora's Miu Miu despite not knowing who she is.
Jolyne then gets tricked into running into a corridor filled with guards, who corner her... but she manages to escape with some Stone Free shenanigans, turning her body into string and sticking herself onto a guard's back. ...the limitations of Stone Free being able to turn into string gets a bit more and more over-the-top from this point onwards, but I do think that it could simply be chalked up to Jolyne practicing and unlocking more abilities of Stone Free.
Jolyne manages to enter Emporio's ghost room, while Emporio himself, in the midst of being zapped, manages to remember that he found out Miu Miu's identity -- Miuccia Miuller, a head guard in the prison. I do really like that there's also a bit of an information war going on. While Jolyne and Emporio are both confused about... well, everything that's going on thanks to their memory being fucked with, Miu Miu is baffled at figuring out Burning Down the House and Emporio's existence himself. It does remind me of how Kira in Part IV was trying to figure out how the cat with a Stand worked, and it's neat to see our villains just as confused at figuring out Stand powers as our heroes can be sometimes.
Jolyne and Emporio meet each other and get overloaded with questions and them constantly forgetting stuff as they try to catch each other up, but at least the little baseball cap kid isn't constantly getting lightning shocks. Poor Emporio! Miu Miu manages to enter the ghost room, and begins her attack. I am not sure just how much this tracks since apparently Jail House Lock's effect only allows Jolyne to register 3 bullets at the same time... just because your brain 'forgot' a piece of information, it really shouldn't disappear completely from your vision, right? It's a bit bizarre, especially since we later find out this applies to guards and Jolyne was successfully able to interact with multiple prisoners and prison staff in the previous episode. And what about the information that "Miu Miu is an enemy" or "Miu Miu has a Stand" and all taht? Don't those count as new information that count among the three as well?
Anyway, the fourth bullet that Jolyne is unable to see hits Emporio, shooting the poor boy and tearing through the computer screen. Jolyne uses the sheer power of... uh... reflections and ORA ORA or something to deflect all the bullets at once... because somehow looking at the reflection of bullets in a puddle is considered a 'single information' even though it's multiple moving items on a reflection? What? Huh? Jolyne then stitches "avenge Emporio" on her arm, burning it as a memory that she'll presumably keep remembering. I would say that it's a plot hole that Jolyne somehow remembers that she needs to beat up Miu Miu -- considering how much of the arc focuses on Jolyne even having to realize she's fighting her at all -- but the anime adds a whole sequence where Jolyne puts a string on Miu Miu's radio while she's talking to Emporio, allowing her to instantly pull the string and know that whoever's connected to it is an enemy. Nice, anime team.
It's always very bland in the manga, and the anime does remedy this a bit by adding a scene of Jolyne giving Emporio a huge, motivational speech and basically telling him that he can choose to leave the prison or stay there in uncertainty, carpe diem and all that.
Meanwhile, we get a brief scuffle between Miu Miu and Jolyne, attracting the attention of a large amount of guards. Jolyne gets overwhelmed both by the sheer number of guards converging on her, as well as Jail House Lock causing her to only perceive three guards at any given time. Emporio shows up and gives Jolyne a paper covered in binary code, which is 0 and 1's... and that counts as two pieces of information, somehow, even as Jolyne goes through the long-ass code, somehow manage to use Stone Free to create an ASCII picture of Miu Miu's face while being held at gunpoint by an army of guards, somehow doesn't lose information through it all, and... I don't know. I just felt like this was the writer looking at the idea of binary code, going "wow, it's so cool that there are only two things involved here" and not realizing that if we take Jail House Lock's powers at face value, there are a lot more information being processed than just the binary numbers.
Anyway, I guess Jolyne gets the information of '0', '1' and 'Miu Miu is an enemy', and she just attacks Miu Miu, holding her hostage. The guards panic, get confused by the presence of a little boy there, and get overwhelmed with some more information. Apparently, Jail House Lock gets activated and hits all the guards? It's a bit unclear, but I guess Jail House Lock is automatically activated on anyone that is around Miu Miu, which I feel is a very terrible thing to have when you're commanding an army with guns. Jolyne drops three bullets to the ground, which is three items and that causes Jolyne and Emporio to disappear from the guards' cognition. They pick up Ermes, and walk out of the prison, vowing to go to Cape Canaveral within the six days before the new moon.
And that's the end of the Jail House Lock arc and... I think I have expressed enough of my frustrations with this arc in the reviews of the two episodes. While there's a bit of eye-rolling with how some things in recent arcs happened -- Foo Fighters somehow being able to 'choose' Anasui as the soul inhabiting the wounded body; Anasui beating Yo-Yo Ma in a rather anticlimactic way -- they all at least make some sense. I really do feel like the sheer specificity of what counts as a memory in Jail House Lock's ability is wildly inconsistent, and none of the ways that Jolyne manages to 'trick' her way, like the reflections or the ASCII picture felt like anything other than an ass pull. Which is such a shame, and I think I was extra-disappointed because the warden of the prison being the final Stand fight in the prison, as well as the concept behind Jail House Lock were all very good. It's just that the conclusions of the fight and how it progresses really didn't work out for me.
Meanwhile, the episode -- and the cour -- ends with Pucci encountering a woman leaving a supermarket. This, by the way, is a very sanitized version of the original scene in the manga. In the anime, Pucci just bumps into a woman walking out of a supermarket, causing some time shenanigans with a mere touch. The woman's watch go fast, her fingernails grow, and the eggs in her groceries hatched into grotesque chicks. It's just to show that Pucci's Stand has evolved, changed, and that he's not fully in control of his power.
In the manga, however, the woman was a shoplifter, which ties a bit into the implied 'judgement' nature of Pucci's powers when he meets Ungalo in the next episode (something that fits his and Dio's god complex) and how Pucci's powers instinctively lashed out against someone unworthy or whatever. There was also a baby with the shoplifter who gets caught up in Pucci's new powers, and has half his face turned into an adult man. JoJo has never really shied away too much from these sorts of grotesque imagery before, but I guess an innocent baby being screwed over irreversibly is too much? Eh. I dunno.
Anyway, this is the end of the second cour. Not the biggest fan of Jail House Lock, though I must say that I've been really enjoying the anime. Again, I think these past couple of episodes do highlight a fair amount of the weaknesses of Stone Ocean compared to the previous (and subsequent) Parts of JoJo... and why I think Stone Ocean is regarded by many as one of the weaker parts of JoJo. There's still a fair amount to like, I think, but breaking down the episodes one by one really did help me put into words a fair amount of my frustrations with this Part.
Not to mention the fact that the staggered batch releases have been... well, I wasn't really going to mention it, but even as a huge JoJo fan who reviews its episodes regularly ever since Part V was released weekly... I really did think that Netflix underestimated the impact of the 'hype' of releasing episodes weekly. It's something that has been successful for Disney+'s Marvel and Star Wars related projects, and why particularly the anime adaptation of Part V of JoJo has been so successful. But the giant glut of episodes being lumped at us all at once, and the gigantic 9-month gap between the cours... yeah, the lack of free marketing from people talking about it online really did end up hammering Stone Ocean with a gigantic negative rep. Couple it to the fact that the Maximum Security Ward is far from being the bets fights in JoJo and... well, it's such a shame since I did remember the hype for the first cour of Stone Ocean was pretty high.
Random Notes:
- Again, following the trend of real-world celebrities or bands being shown as themselves instead of the name of a Stand is removed -- the movie that the prisoners are watching is changed from From Hell starring Johnny Depp (which Jolyne identifies by name in the manga) into a generic movie. Likewise, references to the movie Sixth Sense, which Jolyne spoils the ending to, is removed.
- The comic Jolyne reads is in the style of the Oingo-Boingo artwork from Stardust Crusaders, which I thought was cute.
- I'm not sure why Miu Miu is able to enter Burning Down the House. Wasn't the whole point of that Stand is that the user can choose who to let into the ghost rooms? I do remember Pucci would later access the ghost rooms too, so I guess maybe Miu Miu and Pucci are just powerful enough or something?
- While last episode did establish Miu Miu as being aligned with Pucci, I actually wonder how much Miu Miu actually knows about Pucci's insane ambitions. Is she just a warden who naturally awakens her Stand (it does seem to fit her personality as a control freak warden) and is just doing her job to keep the Stand-users in the prison, or does she believe in the cause or is intimidated by Pucci the way someone like Sports Max was?
- The real manga reason is that Araki wanted Anasui and Weather to have some spotlight in another part of the story, but it is monumentally stupid for Jolyne, Emporio and Ermes to not break out the boys on their way out.
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