©加藤和恵/集英社・ 「青の祓魔師」製作委員会
“Indecision” is the perfect title for this week’s Blue Exorcist episode, though not for the reasons I think the show chose it. I’m not sure if the word “hesitation” mentioned is from Renzo, Izumo, Rin or not. Rather, it’s the Blue Exorcist who’s wavering this week, and I fear that’s detrimental to the story.
To be more specific, about half of the episode was dragged down due to awkward pacing. Everything about Izumo’s desperate attempt to escape the Illuminati himself is pretty good stuff. There’s inherently a lot of drama and suspense conveyed not through spectacle but through the tension of Izumo’s situation, which means we don’t have to worry about the relatively restrained production values that get in the way. becomes the impact of the story. Renzo’s heel turn also embodied all the pain and betrayal it represented, culminating in the brutal destruction of Mike and Ume, Izumo’s grumpy but ultimately loyal acquaintances. After seeing all that Izumo has been through in her life, the loss of the fox souls comes as a surprise, to the point where I feel like any redemption for Renzo is no more at this point, unless the show decides to dial things back with a spoof or something.
The biggest problem with the Izumo plot, which is the timing, actually pulls the story parallel to the rest of our heroes. It’s a classic case of a scene that only takes a few minutes at most to resolve, interspersed with a series of events that take much longer to process, both in terms of runtime and within the story’s universe. Izumo’s escape feels clear and immediate from the first minute, but it wouldn’t be effective to constantly cut back to the escapades of Rin and his gang. They spend hours walking to the hidden base and receive many explanations about the town’s sinister nature, only to then be forced to deal with a further Dawn of the Dead scene when it turns out the center The underground shopping mall that the Illuminati are using as a cover turns out to be filled with zombies.
That’s unfortunate because there’s a very simple fix to this problem: Just wait until the party gets to the complex to start Izumo’s story, so we can let the ticking clock actually run -time. Every second spent dealing with zombies is another opportunity for the Illuminati to ruin Izumo’s life. Technically, that’s still the case with the story being presented, but we don’t feel it as much as it could.
That said, this entire episode wasn’t bad or anything. It just seems like a lot worse than it has any right to be, considering how much effort Blue Exorcist put into building this rescue mission. Now that everyone is (more or less) in the same place, with the same goal—to escape Inari—we can hope that this arc picks up the pace and execution again. its story next week.
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Blue Exorcist: Shimane Illuminati Saga is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which you can also find on Twitter his blog and his podcast.