JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E29 Review: Namek Timing

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 29: Under World

And yeah, this fight has the rest of the Under World fight. Again, I do realize that many of the fights in Stone Ocean have had a lot of criticism, particularly without the benefit of an anime. I reread all the more 'problematic' Stand fights in the manga, and... Dragon's Dream and Yo-Yo Ma really did drag on forever. (My criticism about the end of Yo-Yo Ma is even more amplified in the manga where it really did just feel like the 'merge a frog's brain' thing literally came out of nowhere) A lot of the conflicts  in Stone Ocean, I think, really ended up catching people a bit unawares because they didn't feel like 'traditional' Shonen Stand battles the way that Part III and Part V's fights did. It's a bit more of a 50/50 thing with Part IV, I feel. Now, to reiterate I really don't mind the fights feeling a bit more like our heroes trying to get out of an utterly bizarre situation... it's just that Stone Ocean has the unenviable quality of having a surplus of these fights, as well as having a rather... poor character screentime distribution, I would say. 

Jolyne is a fine protagonist, sure, but having to share time with Jotaro in the two climaxes in Stone Ocean does take away from her screentime a bit. Take into question that the 'standalone' fights for a lot of the secondary character takes up a lot of time in proportion to how Jotaro, Josuke or Giorno were handled... yeah. It doesn't really help that our supposed main sidekick, Ermes... she really doesn't contribute much other than yell "NANIIIIII" a lot, huh? I've complained about her being sidelined from the maximum security prison, but she doesn't even job in the fights. Honestly, I've always said that F.F. feels more prominent in the prison parts of the manga, and Anasui takes over as the one with more screentime in the latter half. And... I don't hate Anasui like the way many of the fandom seems to, but he's just not that interesting of a character either. 

Anyway, Under World! Again, I do feel like the concept of Under World is interesting. Just like Jail House Lock or Yo-Yo Ma, I could honestly totally see the concept of these powers be the crux and driver of a horror story all on its own. Unfortunately (and this is a problem with a lot of powerful Stone Ocean Stands too) the definition of Under World's power really does make you question why Versus doesn't use it in any more creative ways. 

I do feel like the coolest part of the Under World fight is when Jolyne yolo's her way out of the plane to try and attack Versus, and Versus just summons the memory of fighter jet that's about to crash, trapping Jolyne inside the plane. Jolyne uses Stone Free to steal the phone of one of the confused policemen outside the sinkhole, and tries to call Emporio... and I absolutely love the completely bamboozled face Emporio makes when Jolyne talks about how they're "on a plane underground and it's about to crash!" And it's interesting, sure, but I really did feel like with how Under World is able to summon memories of disasters and whatnot, it really does feel a bit odd that the passenger plane and the fighter jet are the only things Versus really summons offensively. 

I do like Versus's character, though. Pucci keeps basically trying to coach or second-guess Versus and he keeps getting more and more frustrated. We also get Versus's backstory, where he has no idea who his biological father is, and his parents really hated him and preferred his half-sisters. At one point, Versus was running away from home when a super-duper valuable set of sports shoes autographed by some famous sports big-shot literally fell onto his lap from on top of a building... and Versus was arrested by the police. The judge was really angry and yells at him for not even having the balls to own up to his crime, and his parents didn't care enough to fight for an acquittal. The real culprit was caught a couple of months later, but Versus was still traumatized in prison due to his... interesting luck. 

Versus ended up tripping and cutting himself on a knife in the prison yard, causing injury from the knife and from the prisoners that got pissed that Versus accidentally exposed his hidden weapon. Again, just like his half-brother Rikiel a while back, it's very much implied that this is his Stand, Under World, manifesting 'secrets of the earth' in different ways. 

And, well, Versus has had enough of the world and wants to reach whatever 'heaven' is. He digs to look for Pucci's memory while Pucci is staring at the falling plane, finding a memory of Pucci with the Weather Report memory disc. 

Back to the fight -- Jolyne crashes the fighter plane into the passenger plane, and there's apparently a clause in Under World's power where everything still has to happen in real-time, so the explosion and destruction of those planes won't happen even if there's actual impact since they have to follow the 'timing' of the underworld. Some rather creepy imagery as the 'NPC's' of the Under World plane began to calmly catch fire and have their flesh burn off, too. Emporio manages to get back to them with the research, and... yeah, I'm pretty sure Emporio explaining the news report already took up the 'two minutes left' of the plane crashing, but okay.

We do get a very brief confrontation between Stone Free and Under World, but then Under World pulls in a bunch of children from the hospital and drops them into the 'safe' seats where the survivors are safe in. It is a pretty 'Dio' things to do, with Versus gloating that Jolyne and Ermes would be wracked by guilt even if they sacrifice the children. 

And as Pucci questions Versus about whether he feels guilt for sacrificing children, we get the... honestly, another rather bullshit conclusion? Again, the way Kiss has been established in the past shows that it duplicates and re-merges items -- and I can believe that this can result in having a 'spare' head that can take fatal damage, as in the Sports Maxx fight. But somehow, this time around Ermes is able to... create copies of the surviving passengers and hide within? This feels like something that Crazy Diamond or Gold Experience would be able to do instead of Kiss, really. The loophole of 'oh, the passengers survived, just like the seats' is neat, but... I dunno. It just feels rather shoehorned to me. 

(Jolyne unraveling herself into string, however, has been foreshadowed and established before, so that I won't really complain about)

Jolyne then ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA's Under World and Versus. Jolyne leaves Versus hanging on a string while she and Ermes began to confront Pucci. Pucci does one of his speeches about 'fate', and how it's Versus's fate to lose... but then Versus kind of surprises everybody, Pucci involved, by sending Under World to the surface with Weather Report's Disc. Versus rants about how he 'knows' about it, about how Weather Report has a dangerous power that Pucci sealed and that there are dangerous things about him that they don't know. I do like that even Pucci freaks out at this... and then rainbows appear! What a cliffhanger!

And... yeah. Not the biggest fan of this, and like Bohemian Rhapsody, I really did feel like this is a power that could've been a bit more drastic, a bit more epic. The idea of Versus, a minion that betrays the Big Bad Main Villain with his own agenda, should've been interesting, too! Unfortunately I just don't think he quite has the charisma, and despite surviving for at least a couple of episodes down the line, Versus ends up being pretty much kind of irrelevant after this. Well, either way we're done with the Children of Dio sub-plot, and we basically only have the Heavy Weather arc to go before the grand finale.

Random Notes:

• So, uh... even if you do have to suspend your disbelief that Pucci didn't realize Versus is literally using his Stand next to him to dig up memories, how did Versus know how Whitesnake Discs work? We've seen people who aren't Whitesnake or Pucci be able to insert Discs, at least, but it's honestly a bit odd since wouldn't you take time to process the information on the Disc, or is it just instantaneous? 
• Notable, I think, that Donatello Versus, with his first name, fits in the D__o naming scheme that Dio and Dario Brando have.
• I really rush through this episode's review, but I must say I did enjoy Ermes needlessly trash-talking the Under World copies of the old couple that stayed in the safe seats.
• Speaking of which... yeah, the best and creepiest part of Under World is how... NPC-like the people in the memories are, like the flight attendant and passengers that calmly explain in gruesome detail what happens to their bodies in the crash. It's just such a shame that it's limited to just a couple of scenes, and Under World itself never really shows what it can do outside of that one passenger jet.