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JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable
Episode 30

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 30 of
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable ?
Community score: 4.7

Once upon a time there was a young man named Kira Yoshikage who only wanted to live a life of peace and quiet. One day, Kira decided to kill and steal another man's face and live anonymously amongst the man's family. Unfortunately, there are some pesky downsides to filling another man's shoes, like not being able to fit into his shoes and worrying that your new weirdly over-observant son is going to notice.

I love this family so much. I want them in every episode from now until the end of the series. Kira's not-wife, Shinobu, is especially fun as she's grown from cold and lethargic to much brighter and goofier as a result of her new crush on her husband. We see her rolling around on the ground as she tries to talk to cats, she's dressing more youthful, and she's getting all red-faced and excited at every chance to woo her husband. It's kind of sad to think that all this love in the air is the result of her actual husband being dead, because I love this new her.

The center of the plot this week revolves around a cat, one with a hole in its chin to imply that it was hit by the Stand-making arrow at some point. The cat ends up being a nuisance for Shinobu and gets itself killed in an accident before Kira ever gets a chance to confront it. They bury the poor thing, hoping for that to be the end of it. Of course, this show is too weird for that to be the case, and the cat is reborn in the soil as a bizarre little Pokémon-looking plant monster. I'm not sure if the rebirth was a matter of the cat's Stand, since its Stand powers reveal themselves as air manipulation, which it manages to use in all sorts of creative and dangerous ways.

Instead of killing the plant cat (again), Kira decides to keep it in a bowl of soil and hide it away in the attic. Who knows, it could come in handy some day. It's here that Kira's not-son goes snooping around and finds it, determining once and for all that whoever this man living with them is, he's not his real dad and is more than likely the kind to kill.

At this point, I'm not really thinking about Diamond is Unbreakable as a monster-of-the-week show. I had no problem embracing that format for the first two-thirds of the series, but now there's such an interesting side story in Kira's family life that stuff like the Janken boy and last week's Highway Star feel more like distractions from it. Although I understand Kira needs to remain as a nebulous force in the background for a while longer yet, his side of the story is where all the intrigue is. That's the stuff that makes me want to know what happens next.

This episode scratches a lot of itches for me. I fall more and more in love with Kira's family every time we see them, as they become just a little bit more interesting each time. I also love the weird little details regarding what Kira has to do to fit in, like practice the dead husband's handwriting or think about buying slightly bigger shoes when no one's looking. This show has always had a knack for little inconsequential observations like that.

We're in the final stretch of Part Four, and the episodes before Josuke and company inevitably have to confront Kira again are numbered, so I hope we can spend the rest of our time with this show reveling in the good stuff.

Rating: A

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


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