JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

Episode 33

Sometimes JoJo's Bizarre Adventure feels like a gift. Sometimes it's in that exact sweet spot of absurdity where you know it could only have been written by a genius of some kind. This week, we continue and round off the "July 15th" arc, where the show decided to dump three congruent conflicts on us at once. Josuke and friends managed to defeat Kanedaichi, but there were still the two Stand users stalking Rohan and Koichi to worry about. Last week's episode ended with Josuke confronting Koichi's kidnapper, but their new opposing Stand user's ability was still a mystery.

Our opponent this week is Terunosuke Miyamoto and his Stand "Enigma". Enigma has the ability to turn people and objects into folded up pieces of paper that Miyamoto can carry around in his pocket. This power will only activate once a character reveals their nervous tic (like Josuke biting his bottom lip), and it doesn't grant Miyamoto the ability to hurt or kill anybody. Although, if the paper gets ripped by some other means, it will damage the person inside. The way to release a person from this spell is simply to unfold the piece of paper.

The Enigma fight would have served as a cool, funny JoJo fight all on its own, but it's accompanied by Rohan Kishibe's story as well. Rohan has fallen victim to Cheap Trick, the Stand born from the back of the architect who had arrived to inspect Rohan's house. The only thing Cheap Trick seems capable of doing is latching itself onto Rohan's back (I guess it counts as Rohan's Stand now?) and whispering things in the hopes of annoying Rohan into doing what it says. It casually recommends that Rohan burn all the pictures that he had been taking in his attempt to track down the new Yoshikage Kira. Cheap Trick can't make Rohan do anything, but it's funny seeing Rohan try to shake him off.

This episode has so much to offer in the JoJo weirdness category. The Rohan stuff aside, most of the Enigma fight falls on the shoulders of Yuya Fungami and Highway Star. Fungami is moved by Josuke's winning "power of friendship" moment where he risks his life to save a piece of paper that only might have Koichi inside of it, because "If there's even a 1% chance that it's Koichi, then my only choice is to save him!" Fungami and Josuke end up finding a lot of cool mutual respect for each other, earned by way of a life or death fight between Fungami and an ordinary paper shredder in the middle of an open field.

Between Miyamoto's powers (pulling hot soup and taxis out of his paper) and the benign threat of Cheap Trick, it really feels like they cranked the JoJo-ness up this episode. There's always that hard-to-describe balance between drama, weirdness, and pointlessness that contributes to the charm of this show. On top of that, Josuke's badass self-sacrifice and Fungami's turn as an ally work as some of the strongest classic shonen material we've gotten out of the show in a while. This episode feels like Diamond is Unbreakable in its truest form.

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