JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E28 Review: Final Destination

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 28: Time For Heaven - Three Days Until the New Moon

So after finishing off the first two children of Dio, we enter the final and perhaps most 'plot-relevant' one? Or the one sticks around longer than his fight, anyway. Stone Ocean is the only JoJo part I haven't reread, and I must confess that I forgot about a lot of the details other than a vague recollection of a lot of the Stands. The Underworld battle is one I completely forgot.

This episode opens up in a hospital, where Jolyne, Ermes and Emporio discuss what to do. The two adults decide to confront Father Pucci in the hospital, while Emporio goes off to deliver Jotaro's memory Disc to a Speedwagon foundation guy. There's a sweet little moment between Jolyne and Emporio.

Meanwhile, Pucci is talking with Donatello Versus, the final member of the children of Dio. They have a long discussion about shellfish and whether the dish served to Pucci has shellfish in it. Versus is apparently extremely sensitive about these sorts of things. Pucci and Versus talk a bit about some random stuff like weight and whatnot, which I don't think really ever comes up again? It's honestly kind of a weird scene that doesn't build up either Pucci or Versus's personalities or motivations all that much. 

Pucci realizes that Jolyne and Ermes are in the corridor outside the hospital room they are in, and Pucci starts talking more about fate and gravity bringing people together, which fits the priest a lot better. Versus suddenly sees a face and a hand coming out of the food... which corresponds to the random wounded child that Jolyne encountered before entering the hospital. The disembodied child tells Versus that it was his own father that shot him, and then a bullet flies out of the strange fixture and hits the child's father in the corridor. 

Jolyne and Ermes burst into the room, with Jolyne sticking to her theory that there's probably another enemy with a Stand. There is a massive, physically-impossible sinkhole in the hospital room. Ermes discourages Jolyne from going in, but Jolyne... well, I guess her biggest character trait is really 'I will rush forwards no matter the danger'? Though Jolyne does make the good point that Father Pucci could just very well stay underground and wait out the three days until the New Moon. 

They do take decent precaution, with Jolyne using Stone Free as a lifeline while she lowers herself into the underground tunnel, and leaving Ermes on ground level.

...and then Jolyne realizes that she's inside a plane, randomly, and she sees that the date is of the past -- July 2005. Everyone in the plane isn't even reliving the past, but rather acting like dolls or zombies, or like NPC's to use a video gaming term. 

She is utterly bamboozled because she is in a plane, in a yawning underground cavern, while the plane is falling, suspended mid-air somehow. Pucci and Versus loom menacingly on a part of the underground rock formation, and Versus sends out his Stand, Under World, to scuttle around like a lunatic and try to cut off Jolyne's lifeline. Under World is able to phase through the earth, and while Jolyne yells out through the string at Ermes.

There's a bit of a scuffle as Jolyne tries to get back to the surface and ask Ermes to rescue her, and some pretty fun usage of Stone Free's string body to hide a pen that Jolyne uses as a makeshift missile. There is a neat little discussion from the calm Pucci and Versus, with Pucci second-guessing Versus and this ends up really annoying Versus, who acts all nice and friendly but is ultimately questioning why Pucci should get to 'heaven' and to his birthright. It's a nice little contrast, where Versus is the son that inherits Dio's immense ego, as compared to Ungalo inheriting Dio's psychopathy, Rikiel inheriting Dio's 'honourable warrior' mentality that shows up here and there, and if we want to count him, Giorno inheriting Dio's intelligence and charm.

Ermes, meanwhile, gets assaulted by a zombified version of Sports Maxx, who attacks her and basically gives a brief explanation about Under World. "The earth remembers everything", from simple deaths like Sports Maxx or the boy that got shot with a gun, to entire catastrophes like the falling plane. This freaks Ermes out, and her attempt to attack Sports Maxx causes her to fall down the hole, drag Jolyne down with her and the two are trapped inside the plane. As per the memory recorded in the earth, the stewardess announces that the plane will crash soon. Jolyne and Ermes run around the plane trying to figure out what to do. Outside, Pucci asks Versus if he could accelerate the plane crashing, but Versus can't do anything but just let the memory play out... and he gets pissed at Pucci questioning him all the time. There are two minutes left before the crash, which means that in anime terms, we've got time for a whole 20-minute episode. 

And I'll be honest, I've clearly found the Under World fight so memorable that I didn't remember it too much, and even though some fights in Stone Ocean did drag on or had ridiculous concept like Yo-Yo Ma, Dragon's Dream, Bohemian Rhapsody and ultimately Made in Heaven... this one just feels like a more grandiose version of Moody Blues from Vento Auero, and I don't really think Versus does anything particularly interesting with it. The setup is pretty neat for a 'Stand of the week' fight, though as you can see the relative length of my review/synopsis for this episode compared to the previous ones, I really didn't have much to say about Under World. 

Random Notes:

• Under World is named after the Wales band Underworld. In addition to its thematic naming, it also has "World" in its name, like, y'know, The World. 
• Donatello Versus is named after the sister of Vercase's founder, Donatella Vercase, as well as her spin-off of the Vercase brand, 'Versus'.
• As someone who gets violently allergic to shellfish, I completely sympathize with Pucci in that scene! Sure, the main dish might be free of shellfish and shit, but the sheer amount of cooks who don't get that "the customer can't eat shellfish" and serve sauce pureed with scallop pieces is too damn high.
• In case you forgot, Stone Ocean is set in 2011... but it was written in the 90's, hence the strange anachronism with cell phones, computers and the internet. 
• I did vaguely remember that there was a bit of a joke about Versus having a hairdo that resembled a dong, but... I've never quite saw the phallus in the design. Regardless, the anime gave more definition to the hair to avoid any comparisons. 
• I am rather disappointed that the anime doesn't add the headcanon that Giorno is making his way towards Cape Canaveral during the events of Stone Ocean, since he, too, is a son of Dio... but I guess there's the question of why Giorno doesn't just Gold Experience Requiem and beat the shit out of Pucci. 
• All the shit about "that's no Stand, that's a bullet!" when the flan-boy shot his own father... Ermes and Jolyne really forgot that Whitesnake ran around toting a handgun in the first cour climax, huh?