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?
possible spoiler?
now the ending is making more sense.. but does it hinted that Yuzuki also refused to be the next Jigoku Shoujo and disappeared?
I also loved this ep!!! It was indeed “fantastic”, and just seeing as everything that was part of the existence of Yuzuki dissapearing, no ” never have existing in the first place” anyway, making us realize the main chrter we all thought alive( naturally) was a ghost all along, it was such an amazing surprise and scary ” discovering you’ve been clinging to your previous life without knowing you were already dead ( I suppose killed or smthg, maybe Yuzuki didn’t want to admit it but she must hold a grudge against someone herself, always thought it was weird that Yuzuki lived all by herself and seemed aloof from others, like “she’s here and not here” , always had a strange feeling about her, but discovering she was dead and living in wrecked appartment where her own corpse laid!!!!! I never thought that coming, it was impressive!!! Totally agree with you psgels, that ep proved to be the best one of all!!!