Category: Finished Series: Mystery/Suspense

Short Synopsis: Yuzuki is!%$#%#$@$@#!@#!#$@!@#!!!!!
Episode Rating: 9/10 (Fantastic)
Holy. Freaking. Heck! Oh my god, what an utterly incredible episode. I would even go as far as saying that this has been the single best episode that I have ever seen from Jigoku Shoujo, and with such an amazing series, THAT HAS TO SAY SOMETHING. Oh my god… I’m still amazed at the huge guts of the creators to pull such a plot twist….

So yeah, we all know the problems with the third season of Jigoku Shoujo: the incredibly far fetched stories that populated that first half. But seriously, the show has managed to pick itself up so wonderfully after that first half. It really is something the second season didn’t succeed at, and while at one point I claimed the third season to be the weakest of the bunch, I’m going to have to take that back now. Mitsuganae is at least better than Futakomori, and if the rest of the finale is as amazing as this one, it might as well be as memorable as the original series.

Because, ZOMG, Yuzuki turns out to have been a ghost in denial! Everything that happened so far was because she refused to acknowledge that she was dead, while in fact she was simply being recruited by Ai to join her league. It was indeed very weird for Ai to just pick out a random girl, but there’s nothing weird about it at all: Yuzuki is just another one in a string of random corpses that Ai tried to use in order to find her successor. My guess would be that all of them tried to escape to their previous lives when they found out, leaving Ai without a body again, in search for the next one.

I have to say that I was getting a bit wary of this series when the previous episode still came with the usual revenges, but now I see that this is the sort of climaxes that really works on the surprise element, and thus doesn’t need that many episodes, as opposed to the ending of the second season, which required much more build-up to work.

And yeah, the first half was good for another thing: it helped me lowering my standards for this series. At the beginning of this series, I really was expecting the most amazing series, that may have been a bit too unrealistic. But unlike the stories of the first season, which were incredibly diverse, the stories of the third season all were much more similar in atmosphere and themes. At the expense of the lack of diversity, it did allow the series for some magnificent build-up for the grand finale of the season, and oh my god… it worked so well.

On a completely unrelated side-note: was I the only one who loved how that little crawling ant was animated?

Short Synopsis: A boy who is bullied by some of his classmates calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
When talking about episodic series about a school setting, then the bullied kid is often a very popular storyline (or take any dark series set in school). I really have to say that this has been the best story about bullying I have ever seen. One of the most thought-provoking episodes of Jigoku Shoujo yet and yet again an awesome addition to the finale of the third season of this series.

Nearly always, these bullied stories are very exaggerated: the bullies are portrayed as pure evil, and the bullied one is entirely portrayed as the victim, or at the least the bullies are some sort of misguided villains. We should sympathize with the victims and hate the bullies, because that’s the politically correct thing to do. The best example I can think of right now is that episode Shigofumi dedicated to it. We could sympathize with the bullied one because he was just a good kid who only made one mistaken.

This episode showed that with bullying, people too often try to seek the problem with the bullies. The guy in this episode had enough reasons to be hated. He comes from a rich family, and is basically a spoiled brat, and yet he stood SO FAR away from the usual spoiled rich kids that anime has become notorious for. There’s this whole “I am better than you”-air around him, and that’s why he gets bullied, which only increases this air, spiralling out of control. Especially since the ones who bully him do so mostly because they hate how the guy is wasting money like he is. He continues to flaunt around with expensive tools, like very expensive watches, flat-screens and cameras, while the bullied guy has lost his father, has a sister who out of necessity needed to grow up fast in order to support her family because he himself is bad with the household chores.

Especially the scene in which Ai hands out Wanyuudo to the guy: he really expected himself to be the pure victim, even though he should be happy that he’s got so much money to spend. I think that he never really tried to talk things out with the bullies: whenever they start to threaten him, he’d just pay them off with money, or whatever gadget he was holding. It’s a very interesting kind of discrimination.

And damn… I could have sworn that we have seen one of the bullies before, but I can’t remember the exact episode in which that happened!

In any case, I’m surprised that the series is still going for revenges at this point, with only three episodes left. There was also hardly any Yuzuki in this episode, so I really wonder for what kind of climax the creators are going. It’s clear that they’re building up like crazy right now, and I’m not complaining about this at all, since the past few episodes have been absolutely amazing. And then again, the creators have had an entire season to fully plan in that climax of theirs, and they’ve also done a very successful climax twice before, so something really strange is going to have to happen in order to screw up the ending for the third season.

Short Synopsis: A girl whose identical twin sister is a famous idol calls Jigoku Tsuushin
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Oh boy, this series sure has rocked for the past number of episodes. This episode probably was the last of the regular revenges, and the finale should start next week, and it was yet another great episode that yet again shatters the borders between good and evil.

First it’s established that the girl has a very cocky older sister who she envies a lot (including her boyfriend). The girl then gets to take revenge when her sister gets into an accident and she gets to take over her role. While she’s normally shy and held back, she falls in love with standing in the spotlight and soon starts taking over her sister’s life that she worked hard for to attain. Even when the sister gets better, she isn’t backing down. In the end the sister is the one who calls Jigoku Tsuushin in order to have the pesky sister that tried to take over her life moved to hell. What was especially great about this episode is that at one point, you could hardly tell which one was which, and only if you paid a lot of attention you could see which one was being sent to hell.

Okay, so four episodes left, and the creators have done a very good job at keeping the contents of the finale of this series a total mystery. Seriously, I have no bloody idea what the creators are going to fill those final episodes with, apart from one episode’s attention to Yuzuki’s mother, and that pesky spider is probably yet again going to wait until episode 26 before it shows up.

Short Synopsis: A boy whose mother is pregnant calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Episode Rating: 9/10 (Fantastic)
Easily the best episode of the third season. Oh, it’s awesome to see how good the final third of this series has become, compared to the huge trainwrecks of the first two thirds. They definitely served their purpose, and it’s really episodes like this one that remind me why I’m such a big fan of this series. Originally when it started out, it was the second-biggest reason after Mahou Shoujotai for me to start blogging, and now more than three years later it’s still going really strong.

First of all: Muahaha! Kikuri is also planning to become the next Jigoku Shoujo (I loved the “Ai no Baka!”, by the way). This just begs the question why she didn’t just take over Ai’s role when she died for the first time, and why she was the one who reunited the dolls again after Ai came back. She may prove to become an unexpected ally of Mizuki, though. That’s going to be interesting. 😛

As for the story this episode, it really was a sad yet typical case of domestic violence: one parent is abusing her child (who isn’t even hers), and the other parent knows about it but turns a blind eye to it. The ironic thing is that the stepmother used to be very nice, until she got pregnant. She really wanted to have a happy family at all costs, and when the boy didn’t turn into the only one who could provide her with this she started seeing him just as second fodder (plus, pregnant women can be scary).

The perspective of the boy was also awesome, and the exact reason why any sort of domestic violence is BAD. Even though he’s constantly abused by his step mother, all he thinks about is the fun times they had, and the one responsible in his eyes isn’t his mother, but the about-to-be-born baby, so he ends up sending his future little sister to hell. Since he’s just a small boy who just happens to be a bit more mature for his age and so able to find Jigoku Tsuushin on his own, as he grows up he’s steadily going to be able to see the huge mistake he made in his childhood.

I also loved the effects that the previous episode had on this one: the dolls now start involving themselves more and more with the cases, and they now talk to Yuzuki on a much more personal level, instead of having to remain in the shadows all of the time.

And you also HAVE to love the final scene of this episode. That explains exactly why the creators waited so long with letting Yuzuki getting close to the different people who accessed Jigoku Tsuushin. Even though in this episode she did a lot of work to prevent the boy from using Jigoku Shoujo, when she looked at the end result and how he was happy, she couldn’t help but smile, and we immediately see Ai spying on her. Bring on the character-development!

Short Synopsis: A scientist calls Jigoku Tsuushin
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
This was definitely the best episode of the third season yet in terms of solid storytelling. Now this is EXACTLY why I’ve become such a big fan of the franchise: it’s nearly always entertaining to see the different revenges, but the real goodness pops up once the story starts touching the main storyline, which is purposefully saved until near the end.

In the third season, where most of the revenges simply looked like each other, this episode stands out as a really unique one, in which it attempts to combine technology with the supernatural. Faking a grudge with the help of a machine. Most of the time, magic is something… magical that no technology can touch, and here we have a very practical example of how technology can manipulate the human body, and so affect the magic in this series. And of course, any episode in which Ai appears for more than three minutes is nothing short of awesome.

And yeah, it’s AWESOME to see Tsugumi back again. To think that it’s been twenty years since the first season. Now all that’s left is for Hajime to make his reappearance with more than that very short cameo in the second season, and I’ll be really happy. It’s also interesting how Tsugumi doesn’t address him with “father”, “dad” or any other Japanese equivalent, but instead addresses him with “Hajime-chan”. That just signifies how extraordinary the relationship between the two has become (well, okay I know nothing about how this goes in the Japanese society, but at least it’s pretty rare for anime; I can only recall one other series which did the same: Arusu in Mahou Shoujotai, which immediately makes it something awesome).

Short Synopsis: A famous flower arranger calls Jigoku Tsuushin
Episode Rating: 8/10 (if only because of that awesome plot twist at the end)
Muahaha! Oh, this is going to be awesome! I guess that I should have seen it coming, but the end of this episode finally reveals the purpose of Yuzuki, something that the show has been building up for nineteen episodes so far: She’s going to be the next Jigoku Shoujo! Oh, this is going to mean two things:
– How the heck is she going to accept the revenges that she loathes? How the heck is she going to accept her job?
– If she’s going to take over Jigoku Shoujo’s role, then what the heck is going to happen to Ai!? Was she just brought back by the spider temporarily in order to find a replacement for her? Talk about cruel.

Oh, and here I thought that she was simply going to be the next Tsugumi. I guess that that now reveals that the final scene of the second season: it probably was a flash-forward (or whatever that’s called) to the future in which Yuzuki has taken up her role as Jigoku Shoujo. The finales of Jigoku Shoujo are always excellent due to the immense amount of build-up that goes into them, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how the creators are planning to instate her as the next Jigoku Shoujo.

Anyway, the rest of this episode was the standard though solid revenge. The theme is yet another one of the evils of society: heritages. Oh, those things can be real bitches if both parties can’t agree on what they want. If I understood correctly, in this episode two sisters try to respectively poison and send the other to hell because of it. The boyfriend was a bit crazy, though: why couldn’t he just point out that the drink was poisoned, rather than gobble everything up in order to prove his point?

Short Synopsis: A girl who likes to send her stories to a well-known radio-host calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
I really wonder what Ai is doing behind that computer of hers. “Ippen Shinde Miru… wait, let me check my e-mail first”.

In any case, we have another standard episode again, this time about teenaged girls and their idols, where we have a young teenaged girl whose hopes are crushed when she finds out that her idol simply reads a pre-written script. Well, that’s multimedia. Even “reality”-shows are written by professional scriptwriters nowadays, but it must have been quite a shock for the poor girl to find out about this.

Okay, and so I was wrong: Yuzuki most definitely isn’t going to be the next Tsugumi, this series is simply using her to build u for this series’ finale. She hasn’t done anything to stop the revenges at this point. All she’s done so far is failing. You’d think that at episode 18 she’d at least book some sort of progress, but now I’m sure that the creators are really saving the best of her for the show’s finale.

Overall, now that the finale is about to begin, it’s time to look back at the past season. Overall, the random stories in the third season have been the weakest of the three seasons of Jigoku Shoujo so far. The good thing about them is that they always picked out some extreme taboo and started playing with it. The bad thing is the lack of variety. Compared to the first season, the cases now all look like each other, while the first season had a number of very creative and surprising stories, despite the show’s formula. Nevertheless, this series never lost track of its atmosphere, and the stories never fail to entertain, so even though it’s not as good as the previous seasons, I’m not disappointed by this series at all and would love to see a fourth season. ^^;

Short Synopsis: An elderly woman calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Haha! It’s the bizarre episodes like this one that really make Jigoku Shoujo worth watching. This episode tells about the backstory of Yamawarou, the new kid in the third season, and it’s a really imaginative one. He once was a fungus spirit (or whatever that’s known as in Japan), watching over a family as they lost their son. Eventually when the father and mother grew older, he appeared in front of them as the son that they lost.

The husband and wife both reacted very differently. The wife saw Yamawarou as the reincarnation of her son. The husband instead, was a scientist and never saw Yamawarou as a human being, and instead performed his experiments on the guy, in order to find a cure for his wife who was about to die. When the wife found out, she sent Yamawarou away in order to prevent him from being taken advantage of. He then ended up by Jigoku Shoujo. A while later, the wife couldn’t take it anymore and wanted also revenge on her husband and so she calls Jigoku Tsuushin. Yet again wonderfully off-balanced on the moral scale.

It’s also great to see finally what’s up with Yamawarou. There was no hidden purpose to the guy, and instead he simply was the fourth doll that Ai collected. He just happened to arrive when he lost his body. The big mystery now of course is Kikuri, and she definitely showed a different side of herself in this episode. But then again, with this show you never know which questions it’s going to answer, and which ones it’s going to reserve for a potential fourth season. ^^;

I do wish for Yuzuki to become a bit more involved than she has now. Especially since this episode so forcefully wrote her away, I really want to see her become more involved with the different victims in her own way, and see the reality of the Jigoku Tsuushin. This is why I consider the first season of this series to still be the best of the three: in the second half, the revenges weren’t simply random, but so chosen in order to get some great character-development out of Hajime and Tsugumi. In the second season, the stories at this point were merely arranged to show some background on Ai’s dolls. While that’s important as well, it’s less awesome than seeing people’s beliefs challenged like the first season did. I’m really hoping for this third season to show sort-of a combination between the two, but for that to happen Yuzuki really needs to get some more confidence.

Short Synopsis: Yuzuki continues to try and prevent people from pulling the string… without much success.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Haha! Another excellent episode this time. This series’ finale promises to become better than the two previous seasons, if it’s already this busy with building up. It’s great to see Ai as the bad guy again, rather than the protagonist as the second season portrayed her. In this episode, Yuzuki really was just caught up in her own paranoia when she saw people fiddling with their mobile phones. She actually could have done something if it wasn’t for Ai who got in her way, which pretty much is a first in this season: normally she’d just use her dolls in order to get rid of any annoying people (i.e. Hajime in the first season and Kikuri in the second).

The story this episode was also quite interesting. A guy who genuinely likes a little girl sent a possible potential paedophile to hell: the guy hadn’t done anything yet, and if he wasn’t sent to hell, there’s no telling as to whether he would or would not have done something to that girl. I also have to admit: I didn’t see the ending coming until the lead character of this episode knocked over the picture frame: the potential paedophile had a girlfriend, and this girlfriend is now taking revenge on the one who sent her boyfriend to hell. Not only was it a great plot twist, but it also showed Yuzuki that preventing revenges really isn’t going to be that easy.

Now that this series is about to enter its final third, I’m really curious to see what the creators have planned for it. The first season featured some really creative cases that tested the differences between Hajime and Tsugumi to the limits, the second season revealed the background of the dolls, and in the same pattern, the third season should be about the war between Ai and Yuzuki. The question is of course going to be how far the creators are going to carry this: with already such an extreme first half of this season, what exactly are the creators planning? The past few episodes have been much more focused than the first ten episodes, but it has already focused at building up Ai vs. Yuzuki, so at this point there’s no telling what the creators are up to.