JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

Episode 38

This is it. We're in the final stretch of Diamond is Unbreakable. The opening even commences with bonus sound effects, so you know there's no turning back. (I was never a big fan of this technique. It just seems like sensory overload.) I'm going to be sad to see it go, but I can't get too depressed since there's still a ton of JoJo material for david production to get through eventually.

After a showy fight on the streets of Morioh, the Josuke and Kira fight changes gears. Josuke retreats to the inside of a house in the hopes that Kira will follow him, giving him the advantage due to the close-quarters style of Crazy Diamond. The scenario for this climactic stage of the fight is set up in a pretty interesting way. For the majority of the episode, Josuke and Kira are not in each other's line of sight. Kira refuses to chase after Josuke, so he comes up with ways to use Killer Queen and Stray Cat to fight remotely instead, most significantly using his ghost dad to relay Josuke's location over phone by hiding him in Hayato's pocket.

Thankfully, Josuke catches onto this and sets him on fire, finally releasing him from this world properly. He seemed to have remembered Kira's dad at about the same point that I did. I was definitely wondering where he had gone. He didn't have much to offer his son anymore, and I figured he could have been offed a few episodes back, so I assumed the story must have had at least one last thing planned for him. Now that he's dead, can we finally ask what his deal was? Who thinks up a character like that?! Araki, apparently.

And so, just as one character heads off to the land of the dead, another returns from it. Okuyasu manages a great save when he appears and uses The Hand to redirect and then erase one of Kira/Stray Cat's bomb bubbles, just in the nick of time to save Josuke at his weakest and bloodiest. The explanation as to how he's still alive is abstract. He describes a dream where he heads toward the light and meets his brother, who urges him to decide for himself which direction he should go. With this piece of advice, Okuyasu decides to return to Morioh and wake up, and he's so casual about it that it seems he doesn't realize that he just willed himself back to life. "Whenever I think too much about anything, I get a headache," he says. Fair enough, I guess.

Diamond is Unbreakable's relationship with death and the afterlife is something I still haven't been able to fully crack. There's definitely a theme here, established ever since we met Reimi the ghost girl, where the lines between dead and alive become blurry. The angels of the deceased characters are memorialized in the opening, and there's a purgatory of sorts where one's soul becomes trapped between the two planes. It's a difficult thing to parse because it's a second supernatural element in Morioh that exists independent of Stands. What's the relationship between life and death in this show (a theme that makes Josuke's healing powers all the more interesting, now that I think of it), and are there still things to learn about it? This is especially fascinating to me now, since the show is on track to finishing without any of the noteworthy character deaths that I've been musing over in these reviews for the past few weeks.

The episode wraps in a very satisfying way, with Kira having been defeated on just about every front, despite the rest of the cast only just now arriving as backup. Kira's "aw crap" look is hilarious as Josuke, Jotaro, Koichi, Okuyasu, Rohan, and Hayato all surround him as a united team. He's lost the fight pretty thoroughly at this point. I'm assuming that this is it and there's literally nothing Kira can do, but I'm hoping there can be one last resort, some kind of crazy abstract opening of space and time that'll really blow the scope of the fight up for one last beat. Diamond is Unbreakable has been the most humble of all the JoJo stories, as it's more about people being weirdos and less about world-saving good vs. evil fights, but Kira has been built up so much leading to this final battle that I think something a bit bigger than fisticuffs and strategy has a place here.

Rating: B+

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach writes and records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw