JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E33 Review: In the Beginning, There Was Gravity

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 33: Gravity of the New Moon

With the Weather Report/Heavy Weather segment done, we now reach the final stretch of six episodes. These next couple of bits are going to be devoted to the creation of C-Moon, which I've always felt that, in addition to the brief Weather/Pucci blood-spike brawl, is one of the two highlights of the final stretch of Stone Ocean.

But we do have a bit of a buildup, as our heroes drive to Cape Carneveral. We get what's probably the story's most 'romantic' segment between Jolyne and Anasui's relationship before they are just rather randomly smooshed together at the end of the series. Jolyne sleeps on Anasui in exhaustion, and Anasui goes through a long internal monologue about how he finds Jolyne adorable, and how he went through a lot of trouble to save up money and buy a jeweled ring. Anasui slips the ring into Jolyne's finger. 

Suddenly, they are distracted by Ermes yelling at a bunch of alligators. Remembering their terrible encounters with alligators around the prison, Jolyne and Ermes jeer and boo at the alligators, and Jolyne reflexively threw the ring in her hand, not realizing what it is. It sure whacks an alligator in the head, and Anasui freaks out and slumps into depression. It's a bit of a comedic scene, but... yeah. Anasui's basically just kinda reduced to a bit of a joke as far as his romantic pursuit goes. 

There's also a hilarious bit where Emporio uses his Stand to summon a computer, but Ermes gets absolutely bamboozled when Emporio stuffs an old-school PC onto her lap, separate CPU and all. It's extra-hilarious because this arc is set in 2011! We have laptops by then! Even Ermes is bamboozled. 

We get a bit more focus on Enrico Pucci, who's just trying his best to shamble through the space center. A random friendly bystander that's pretty mouthy says Pucci is with him, but then begins to yammer on and on, asking Pucci religious questions that aren't exactly polite. Pucci, already sweating and out of sorts, tells the guy to piss off. All the while, the speakers give narrations about gravity, and we get a typical JoJo 'did some research on the topic' monologue about how rockets that launch over the equator have an advantage due to a slightly less amount of gravitational pull. There's also some talk about Cape Canaveral being an ideal spot above the sea level. 

And then Pucci's Stand's new powers starts to activate. The soda from a nearby cup spills over 'sideways', splashing onto the guy that's pestering Pucci... and then he suddenly gets pulled sideways and gets impaled to death onto a metal fence as, well, gravity seems to get warped by the effects of Pucci's new Stand. It's an interesting case since we've seen Pucci's presence accelerating time prior to the Children of Dio arc, and now it's gravity... but I guess the Green Baby and anything that has to do with the warping of reality caused by that thing to be kind of unexplained. 

Back to our heroes, we get the revelation that at some point between the Underworld arc and this episode, they've sent Jotaro's memory Disc back to the Speedwagon Foundation, but our heroes decide that they can't afford to wait for Jotaro to come in time... particularly since Pucci is still recovering from the battle against Weather. 

And I really do like this bit as our heroes get trapped in the 3-kilometer radius of C-Moon's power, with Emporio and other drivers being unable to move forwards... as gravity itself is changed, and everyone 'falls down' sideways. It's something that really does make great use of the visual medium, and I do feel like the anime did a respectable job animating the weirdness of this. We get to see cars, people and even other parts of the terrain falling 'sideways' and it looks far, far more apocalyptic than many of the other large-range Stands we've seen before. There's a frantic urgency that makes this feel so much scarier than the uncanny weirdness of Bohemian Rhapsody or the visceral creepiness of Heavy Weather. 

 

During the sequence, Anasui's Diver Down plunges and fuses its hand into the pavement, but Ermes gets hit by a piece of debris and sent tumbling away, taking her out of the fight. Poor, poor Ermes. There's some talk about how they need to beat Enrico Pucci here and now, and Jolyne realizes that this is the power of 'heaven' that Jotaro sealed away in Egypt. Except this is just the beginning, since the 'new moon' will still come soon. They manage to slowly move through the altered gravity, climbing up the guard rails that are still stuck. We get Anasui having some monologue about how he needs to protect Jolyne since he's the only ally left. 

Pucci also has some monologue about gravity and its relation to creation and time, and... yeah. Each 'part' of JoJo will eventually focus on a certain kind of abstract concept, and gravity, fate, time and creation all meld together into the harmony of Pucci's mad designs. I'm a bit too tired to type out every single part of Pucci's dialogue, but it's neat!

As our heroes climb inch by bloody inch towards the visitor center, Emporio finds out that gravity is still fucked up and his phone isn't functioning. And as Jolyne tries to use her Joestar mark to figure out where Pucci is... Pucci's new Stand, the (at this point still-unnamed) C-Moon looms behind her, unaffected by gravity. C-Moon is insanely creepy, and honestly I feel like it's a far cooler traditional 'last boss' for the Part. The way he just moves around the altered gravity with its creepy-ass face, its USHYAAAAAA and being unbothered by the unnatural occurrences is pretty nasty. 

And as Jolyne's arm gets mangled when Pucci hits Stone Free's arm, we are treated to the grotesque sequence of Jolyne's fingers turning inside out. A nice, small little hint to the true nature of C-Moon before we get to see his fight in the next couple of episodes!

Random Notes:

• C-Moon is based on the song C-Moon by Paul McCartney. 
  
• There is an adorable additional bit of detail showing that Emporio strapped a brick onto his feet so that he can reach the car pedals. Now there's really still no explanation why none of the three adults are driving, and they let little Emporio drive. 
• Ermes really does spend every other line yelling NANIII, doesn't she? And then she gets taken out of the earlier part of the C-Moon fight. It's honestly kind of sad, considering she's supposed to be the 'JoBro' of this part.
• We get some scenes of Pucci's skin rippling as he kills that one annoying visitor, but I don't really think Pucci's physical appearance changes, just his Stand. 
• It really is kind of interesting. Does Dio (and by extension, Jotaro) know what the Green Baby will do? That it'll create a Stand that's going to cause gravitational, and eventually temporal, anomalies? Is C-Moon a unique thing created by the fusion of Whitesnake specifically, or if it was some other kind of Stand that fused with the Green Baby, will the resulting C-Moon still be the same? 
• And honestly, this falls into one of the more harder-to-swallow parts of Stone Ocean for me. I actually have no problem that Part-III era Dio has two facets of him, and that he's been doing this Heaven plan off-screen before he fights the Crusaders. But the plan he leaves Pucci seems to be so specific that it's bizarre that he doesn't at least try to enact part of his plan during Part III, beyond vaguely entrusting Pucci with it and keeping him halfway across the world. 
• Yeah, those two random ladies that our heroes don't have time to save are completely dead, aren't they?