Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure – 18

First of all, I was warned about last week: do try to avoid looking at this week’s episode title.

It contains a pretty big spoiler. It’s a bit strange to have this one slip through, because this series seemed to have an excellent production team that has proven to be flexible, so I wonder why nobody who saw it thought “wait, that will spoil the surprise, let’s do something else”.

But first, brains. At the start of the episode I thought that Jojo will have to fight some kind of bizarre pair of walking brains with tentacles, but in the end the fight got once again pulled to the bizarre when he actually took over one of the maids. Brainwashing in anime is nothing new, but the way in which this was done. Seeing her body get nearly torn apart definitely added a different dimension to that, and once again it was a really intense fight.

I also loved the big spoiler of this episode. You should not read this if you haven’t watched the episode yet, but seriously. The way in which they revealed Stroheim as some kind of terminator was hilarious. I kept wondering why they kept hiding his face, but yeah. His new character designs rock.

This show loves to play with its characters: the tough guy suddenly breaks down into uncontrollable tears, the cute maid gets completely disturbing, the sadistic nazi becomes a terminator. I really wonder whether the creators are also planning such huge contrasts for the rest of the cast. I really hope so. Don’t spoil this please, the fun is in finding out whether this is really true.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)