JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 27: Sky High
Note: real life's getting in the way, so Netflix One Piece will be a bit delayed for a while; at least from episode 3 and beyond. The DLC for Pokemon Scarlet/Violet will also definitely be delayed for a while. In the meantime, have some JoJo and monster reviews.
Following the previous episode, we get the second son of Dio and I am rather thankful that this fight wasn't stretched out into two episodes. If this was the Stardust Crusaders anime, they'd totally do that, wouldn't they?
And the 'Sky High' fight is... well, it's really not the most interesting or honestly exciting powers, and really does feel like the writer is just discovering something weird and cool that he thought could be an interesting power. I respect it, honestly, I really do -- but I just didn't really care all that much about the Rods. Rikiel himself is at least a rather interesting character for what we get of him, since he actually gets to fight and confront our protagonists face-to-face, something that Versus and especially Ungalo never really got to do.
Jolyne, Ermes and Emporio suddenly have their eyelids drop and bleed, and their helicopter starts to lose altitude. Jolyne attempts to counterattack against whatever is attacking them within the helicopter, but the adversaries' attacks are able to slip within her nets. We get a rather awesome sequence of Jolyne grabbing all her allies and jumping out of the helicopter. In-between shouting 'NANI' at all the madness Jolyne is doing, Ermes manages to identify their attacker, which is some sort of near-invisible rod-like organism. Ermes unleashes Kiss and destroys the rod, only to realize that they are surrounded by a lot of it. Ermes realizes that what attacks them is not a Stand.
They come face-to-face with Rikiel, who arrives on a motorbike, and we get to see the difference between Rikiel in the past and Rikiel in the present day, which I felt was a much, much more interesting change compared to the minimal amount of characterization we got from Ungalo. Rikiel was a neurotic, sickly man when he met Father Pucci, talking about how his entire life has been terrible thanks to his strange afflictions. However, Pucci pulls out Rikiel's Disc, realizing that his Stand ability is unusual, and that Rikiel's eyelids drooping and everything else that's wrong with him is a side-effect of him being unable to control his Stand. That's a nice bit of world-building that I think we haven't seen in a while. Remember when Jotaro thought Star Platinum was a demon because it was acting on its own to steal stuff and protect him? I kinda wished we got to see more Stands warping reality around it while its owner is unaware.
And even Pucci gets one of his teeth knocked out of his mouth by one of these Rods, and he is absolutely baffled to realize that the Rods have been in the room all the time, just out of sight. And this is the crux of Sky High's power. It controls Rods or Skyfish, which in the early 20th century were some kind of cryptids or UFO's that show up on photographic frames. In real life, these have all been disproved as either insects or flashes of light being caught up in long-exposure photographs or something to that effect, and among the many different UFO myths, this one really doesn't seem to be particularly popular out there.
But in the setting of JoJo, these Rods just... well, they just exist as a type of animal. They aren't manifested by Rikiel's Stand, or anything. They just exist, and move so fast for humans to perceive. I guess it's similar to how vampires and aliens exist. I really shouldn't question too much about this setting, huh?
Back to the fight, I do like that Jolyne and Ermes quickly realize that Rikiel goading them into getting closer means that his Stand works better at close range, something that Rikiel panics when he hears the two heroes discussing this. It is very interesting, coming off the prison (and Part V previously) where everyone with the Stand seems to be at least somewhat experienced with it. Rikiel's previous neuroses come back and he panics when his motorbike sinks into his mud. This allows Ermes to clock Rikiel in the head with some Kiss-assisted boomerang stones. You really do get the feeling that Rikiel is just barely holding his anxiety back, but he's trying his damn best to be useful for the first time in his life -- a stark contrast to the nihilistic, 'burn it all' Ungalo.
We also get Rikiel ranting about something -- in typical JoJo fashion -- and in this case, Rikiel rants about the Apollo 11 space mission. It is, on the surface, kind of a pointless endeavour since we don't really get anything concrete from it, but Rikiel waxes some pretty great lyrical at how being able to 'conquer' space and the Moon is a gigantic leap for the human spirit worldwide. And then Rikiel starts attacking violently with the Rods, causing seemingly random attacks like having Ermes' hand start to rot, immobilizing Jolyne's ankle, or Emporio to start pissing blood. Emporio somehow realizes that the Rods are sucking body heat from their victims, which induces all kinds of ailments in the areas bereft of heat.
...which is a huge stretch to say that that could happen so quickly and without our heroes realizing that parts of their body became cold, but are you really going to argue with the Rods?
Jolyne ends up figuring out that Rikiel has the Star birthmark, and closes her eyes and mouth and just relies on that star connection to know where to land her punches. Rikiel herself grabs Jolyne by the neck, covering it to expose her brain stem to the Rods. They attack each other rapidly, they collapse... and turns out that Rikiel holding Jolyne's neck has ended up protecting that brain stem from the Rods. It's another frankly handwave-y conclusion, but the execution of Jolyne and Rikiel's conflict ends up being a nice distraction from how the powers work that I don't mind all that much.
Rikiel gives some final words about Pucci, and how the man he is indebted to will reach heaven, and that fate will guide Pucci's hand similarly to how it had guided Jolyne's victory. Rikiel also drops a key revelation -- Weather Report is Enrico Pucci's brother by blood. Ermes beats Rikiel up for that, but Jolyne's clearly shaken by the revelations. We close off this episode with a fun little segment where the narrators note that riding a bike without a helmet is allowed in Florida... but there are still crashes, which we see is caused by the Rods swarming around a biker's neck.
Now I've always remembered the Sky High powers because of how out-there and ridiculous the concept is. It's bizarre even by the standards of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure! But I do truly forgot how entertaining the fight between Jolyne and Rikiel is. I think the fact that they really breezed through this episode and a lot of the more esoteric explanations about Rikiel's ability just gets powered through. Instead, I feel like the episode does a pretty great job at focusing on Rikiel's personality and how Pucci has given him a shit-ton of confidence in life.
Random Notes:
- Sky High is a reference to the Jigsaw song, Sky High.
- In the manga, the physical form of the Sky High Stand -- the weird bug-thing on Rikiel's wrist -- never actually shows up outside of cover pages. In the anime, we actually see Rikiel show off Sky High on his person a couple of times.
- Rikiel takes his name from the French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel.
- I normally don't mention the English dub of the anime, but apparently one of the translated lines in this episode is "get the guy with the boob window", which I find absolutely hilarious.
- It's explicit in this episode that it's Pucci that names Sky High's Stand, and I do really like it when there's someone in-universe that names these things. Now Pucci could just be using English words, but he could also just be a huge fan of Jigsaw.
- It is odd, by the way, that Jolyne, Ermes and Emporio recover from the injuries inflicted by Sky High pretty quickly. They don't have Foo Fighters to patch them up that quickly anymore, do they? While I can buy Jolyne using some string-unraveling bullshit to reconstruct her wounds, I don't think Emporio's kidney damage can be healed that quickly.
- Yeah, a lot of the damage caused by 'draining body heat' is honestly pretty nonsensical, like at one point the Rods dip into Jolyne's mouth to drain heat from her hypothalamus in order to confuse her vision? No, it doesn't work like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment