JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 26: Bohemian Rhapsody, Part 2
So we close off the final part of the Boohemian Rhapsody two-parter with this episode, and... again, I'm not the most pleased at how this particular arc ends. It's not quite as annoying as Jail House Lock was in the previous episode, though, because there's an essence of "I counter your bullshit powers with abusing facets of your bullshit powers!" here, which I felt is a bit more forgivable... and I also do think that the wordings and the established powers of Bohemian Rhapsody does work with how Weather Report manages to take him down.
Anyway, the fight is still fun to watch just simply due to how batshit insane the Bohemian Rhapsody stand is. Poor, poor Anasui's soul is running across town in order to be reunited with his body, which is shambling around following Weather (who is preoccupied with trying to figure out and 'sense' where the enemy is). We get the hilarious moment where Anasui bumps into a very confused shopkeeper who yells at Anasui for being a violent vandal. He locks his shop and calls the police, leading to the hilarious sequence of Anasui using Diver Down to steal money from the shopkeeper's own cash register and using those huge wads of money to bribe him.
Anasui also spots his body running around, just as the police come to interrogate the disturbance. There was a brief moment where they think they recognize Anasui as one of the escaped prisoners, but we get the absolutely hilarious image of Anasui with a lumpy, chunky face because he did some impromptu plastic surgery with Diver Down, stuffing his face literally full of chocolates. It's such a random, silly moment that I found to be hilarious, particularly with how insanely distinctive Anasui's clothing and hairstyle are.
All the while this is going on, I love that we get to see people clamouring over Batman, or news reports showing that Kenshiro and Raoh have leveled Tokyo in their fight. Glorious. I'm sad that the rules of copyright means we barely get to see any of these other characters causing havoc, though it is completely understandable.
The small goat gives a brief account of the story, yelling that Anasui 'ate' his siblings, and how his mother will come, cut the 'Big Bad Wolf' up to free her children and drown him in a lake. Anasui gets confused... until his body changes into the Big Bad Wolf instead, realizing that he has been dragged into the story.
Weather Report, meanwhile, meets something else... a man asking for the way to the asylum of Saint-Remi. This is Vincent Van Gogh. Or rather, the self-portrait of Van Gogh. The story of Van Gogh, the iconic story of how he cut off his own ear with a razor, also counts as being a target of Bohemian Rhapsody even if it's technically a real story. While Weather isn't familiar with any of the other fictional fairy tales Anasui was, he either resonates or recognizes this story enough that his soul and body split.
Anasui, meanwhile, gets chased around by the mama goat and... I can't help it. The sheer difference in size between the goat and big, muscular Anasui; the sheer ridiculousness of the malformed human-faced goat holding a pair of scissors; and particularly the menacing sequence of the shadow of the goat in the alley... this sequence ends up feeling ridiculous more than terrifying. Unlike Pinocchio, the Mother Goat is completely and utterly indestructible, reverting back to paper and turning doors into pages and being able to just power through any kind of obstacle Anasui and Diver Down puts in their way. Initially, I thought this was an inconsistency but I realize now it's just the power of the 'story'. Since now Anasui is already 'cast' as the Wolf in the story, everything has to go as the story itself went.
Van Gogh meanwhile continues to talk to Weather, who finally decides to start defending himself, taking the razor away from Van Gogh... but then the razor transforms into a paintbrush and Weather himself starts to turn into a portrait. Some really great artistic choices from the anime team, by the way, in how they drew Van Gogh with that aura of paintwork around him... it even kind of fits the JoJo art style since those paint strokes that follow Van Gogh around almost looks like those 'menacing' kanji so associated with this series.
Van Gogh narrates how the real Van Gogh cut off his ear and killed himself by shooting himself, and notes how the same fate will now befall Weather. The paintbrush turns into a gun that shoots right through Weather's felt-cap-hair-head... but Weather survives this shot because Van Gogh notes that according to the story, the real Van Gogh has to shoot himself twice before dying. (The whole 'it has to be the same as the story' is probably why Weather can literally walk around for the rest of the episode with a hole in his head).
Weather rampages with his weather-manipulation Stand, trying to stop all vehicles to search for the user... until he realizes that the user of Bohemian Rhapsody isn't around them, or even in the city. Rather, he's in the sky -- and we cut to Ungalo hanging out on a near-empty passenger plane. We get Weather rattling off a bunch of speeds, hilariously noting how none of his weather phenomenon would be able to catch up to a jet plane. We get a bit of a flashback from Ungalo's perspective, and Pucci reveals that they are all sons of Dio, and Pucci has gained their alliance offscreen. We get our very brief characterization for Ungalo, which is... extremely basic compared to the other two sons of Dio. Ungalo is a drug addict, a loser, and basically is overjoyed because this power granted to him allows him to wreak havoc in the world.
But Weather manages to grab Van Gogh's arm... and we cut to Ungalo being terrified because the little girl next to him has Aladdin and the Genie (Peter Pan in the manga) back on the cover of her book. Turns out in the split second that Weather grabbed Van Gogh, he forced Van Gogh to create a brand-new character for him, Put Back, a fictional character with the very specific power to put back fictional characters where they belong. It's... it's the 'bullshit way to defeat a bullshit power' thing. I don't think I really have much problem with Mr. Put Back himself, but rather how Weather is somehow able to do this in the split second of a gunshot, I guess.
Anyway, that's the end of Bohemian Rhapsody. Anasui and Weather are saved, Ungalo gets driven into a coma out of despair (which is basically a way to write him out of the story, I guess, though it fits with his characterization) and all the characters except Pinocchio gets put back where they belong.
We have a short scene to cap off the episode, which isn't super-important but I do really like. One of the biggest weakness of nearly all the JoJo parts is that sometimes, certain details are introduced and completely forgotten about or left unexplained, and I do believe that Part VI is one of the more notorious ones for it. But we get an explanation of Jolyne remembering the reason why she was framed and put into Green Dolphin Street Prison in the first place... her jackass boyfriend Romeo. Jolyne and her allies confront Romeo on his big-ass mansion. Romeo is all apologetic and crying and shit... though when you're confronted with a woman with big muscles like Jolyne, I really don't think a fuckboy like Romeo's going to stand up much to a single punch from her.
Romeo is willing to give Jolyne some cash and even transportation -- a helicopter, to boot -- and the two part ways. It's very neat to show Jolyne initially being so cold and completely in control of the situation. During the kiss the two share, however, it's revealed that Jolyne stuck one of Ermes' Kiss stickers on Romeo's tongue, allowing them to overhear his conversation. Romeo immediately calls the police... but turns out that he's been at least a bit good and actually throws the police off their trail.
...and it's a very interesting situation because Romeo is genuinely remorseful and is actually helping them out. But Jolyne rips off the Kiss sticker from Romeo's tongue anyway, causing the tongue to zip back and explode in Romeo's mouth. I guess she still holds a grudge over the whole 'put me in prison' thing, and... you know what? For all the shit Jolyne went through, yeah, Romeo totally deserves it!
Random Notes:
- All references to Spider-Man is likewise dropped. I guess JoJo's Bizarre Adventure doesn't want to get in the Disney/Sony fight over him either. Just like Mickey Mouse before, the line at the end of the arc that refers to Spider-Man is replaced instead by Batman.
- So did any of the Japan-based characters get to see Kenshiro's fight against Raoh? I suppose Morioh is pretty far from Tokyo...
- The news report about Kenshiro is, hilariously, voiced by the actual voice actor that does the narrator for Fist of the North Star in multimedia projects. Chiba Shigeru has previously voiced Yoshikage Kira in Part IV!
- Kira would love to be alive while Bohemian Rhapsody is going on. Mona Lisa would be running around, wouldn't she?
- Interestingly, the entire sequence in the plane of the final characters Ungalo sees both outside his window and in the book the little girl were reading gets changed from Peter Pan and Tinkerbell to Aladdin and his genie. It's... it's a metaphor that works in a different way?
- The manga version obviously highlights Ungalo as a toxic manchild who refuses to grow up, just like how Peter Pan is a child that is literally unable to grow up.
- Meanwhile, Aladdin starts off as a nobody that finds the power of the mighty genie, representing how Ungalo was a drug addict nobody that rose to power when his encounter with Pucci causes his godlike Stand to manifest.
- Other references that show up in the anime include voice references to Mona Lisa and Tweety Bird, as well as the art pieces Girl with the Pearl Earring and Heracles. Interestingly, while the anime has had no problems referencing Snoopy before (which was when Jolyne rants about vegetables looking like Snoopy during the Green Baby episode) the reference to Snoopy is changed to Tweety.
- Oh man, the creepiest thing about the goats is when Anasui spits out some chocolate from his mouth and it turns into a goat fragment.
- I am rather bummed that we don't get at least a token scene of Jolyne, Ermes and Emporio meeting like one or two fictional characters.
- I forgot to mention it in the body of my reviews for both the Bohemian Rhapsody episodes, but I Weather having the ability to sense where Ungalo is ends up being kind of a nod to the whole 'gravity pulls each other' thing, where everyone with the star birthmark can sense each other.
- Speaking of the Romeo tongue thing, if Jolyne didn't actually want to hurt Romeo, could Ermes cancel out the effect of her stickers? Romeo's bound to notice a sticker dangling from his tongue at some point, right? Which means that he's doomed or destined to have Kiss's effect cause the tongues to merge and explode anyway. Again, unlike a lot of the other 'JoBros', we don't really learn too much about the exact limitations of Kiss since Ermes is so criminally underused in this Part.
No comments:
Post a Comment