JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders Egypt Arc

Episode 18

It takes another full half of this episode, but the fight with Terence T. D'Arby has finally ended. In the words of Joseph Joestar: "Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh My God."

The solution to beating him turns out to be pretty simple. It seems that Atum can actually read souls rather than minds, and souls can never lie. (Dang. I was hoping maybe it was more complicated than that. Oh well. Surprise specific superpower of Atum's #263: his soul-reading's only limitation is that it must take the form of a Yes or No question.) All Jotaro has to do is play the game exactly as he normally would, call the pitches exactly as he would normally make them, and hit the buttons exactly as he'd normally hit them. This is exactly what D'Arby observes, and yet the pitches go awry every single time. How can he be cheating? It's impossible! Yes it is, but it is not impossible for Grandpa Jojo to cheat, as he uses Hermit Purple to press different buttons from Jojo on the controller. D'Arby's arrogant isolation is his weak point. He was so focused on defeating his rivals "fairly," mano a mano, through mastery of video games that he mastered alone, he hadn't stopped to consider the two-player option.

Watching D'Arby the Younger completely lose it (literally and figuratively) is tons more fun than hearing him wax on and on about his tactics, so this battle concludes much stronger than it beginnings and middles. Once he's finally out of the picture, the real trouble begins as Avdol, Polnareff, and Iggy step into the mansion, and the Stardust Crusaders suffer their first true casualty. In a way, it's really their second casualty. Poor Avdol has died before.

Yes, this is the tragically abrupt end of the road for Muhammad Avdol, at the hands of Vanilla Ice, Dio's final line of defense with a terrifying stand named Cream. Vanilla Ice is not frightful because he's a bad rapper, though. His terror comes from his slavish, robotic devotion to Dio, who assures the audience that unwavering loyalty is the most powerful trait a minion can have. (It is if you serve the master of all evil, I guess.) When Dio says jump, Vanilla Ice says how high. When Dio says "I need a blood sacrifice," Vanilla Ice says SLICE! SPLORTCH! Splat-splat-splat... That's all there is to it.

After his head's been reattached via vampire magic, we learn the full extent of Ice's stand powers. Cream is so delicious that he fights by eating himself (and his stand user!) His belly is a dark void, a dimension of nothingness, and anything it touches is erased from existence forever. Needless to say, this is a bummer for Avdol as the first sacrifice to demonstrate the power of Dio's right hand iceman. "Look," Araki seems to be saying, "You got a big, dramatic funeral and burial for him earlier. Then I brought him back because everyone got all sad about it. You've had lots of good times together, so now it's time for me to yank him back out like I always intended. No, you don't get another big, dramatic funeral! That's just not how this works."

On the one hand, this episode's two halves are back to peak Jojo's in their own wildly different ways. The first half is funny, wild, and triumphant. The second half is weird, ominous, and intense. All is as it should be again. On the other hand, dusting off Avdol in such a harsh and unexpected way makes it hard to believe he's really dead at all. To anyone well-versed in shonen manga tropes, the presentation here suggests that Avdol is not really dead. It was so fast and unfair! On top of that, there's no body to mourn, just two disembodied hands cut off by the dimensional vortex (that Cream promptly picks up and swallows.) No one is safe anymore. You already got your goodbye for Avdol, and he's not coming back this time. There are only two enemy stands remaining, and it's going to be chaos all the way down.

(Side note: at some point a stand user named Kenny G (Billie Jean in the subs) is defeated in one blow by Iggy before he even gets to make an introduction. He was responsible for generating the mansion's menacing, labyrinthine aura, but it turns out he's not important, so I guess Araki was sweeping a few discarded plotlines under the rug on that one. The mansion is spooky. It doesn't matter why. Sorry, Kenny G.)

Rating: A

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders Egypt Arc is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.