Hell's Paradise Season 2

Episode 10

This episode of Hell's Paradise does something that I didn't realize the series could do, and that's build up emotional character moments off the back of the previous shock value deaths from season one. One of the main appeals for Hell's Paradise early on was that it felt like anybody could die, and according to the original creator, that is very much by design. It's fun speculating on different “what if” scenarios on how things would've turned out if certain characters had survived a little bit longer in the series. While I do think the show has unfortunately made it clear that no one else in the main cast is going to die anymore, a couple of episodes have shown that this could be replaced with a different type of genuine emotional pathos.

It's nice to get a little bit of insight into Shion's backstory. He's someone who has always been seen as the moral compass of the group, despite rising in the ranks on the back of a lie. That's an interesting contrast because it showcases that this is a man who probably lives with a lot more guilt and sorrow than he lets on. This episode was all about him feeling guilty about leaving Tenza behind, and I do like the symbolic irony of him “seeing” the pain in Tenza's face. The fact that it took someone a lot more innocent and inexperienced to showcase that Tenza died proudly because they got to live, was a very poignant way of bringing his character arc full circle.

There are some issues in the execution that held the episode back a little compared to the past couple of fights that I saw. While I do like the idea of defeating one of the Tensen more straightforwardly, that could've been executed a lot better. This was basically a war of endurance, showcasing that the Tensen can be killed even without natural elemental weakness; you just have to continuously beat them to the point where they overextend their immortality. The problem is that most of the fight was already done off-screen, so by the time this episode started, you could argue that there wasn't much left except a slow, drawn-out slugfest. You can make that interesting by showing a more straightforward fight. It would've been a nice break from the fantastic, choreographed scenes in the past couple of episodes, but there isn't really anything visually interesting to watch here. The episode ending vaguely also doesn't help.

Nurugai spends most of the episode just sort of there until it's time for her to be the emotional linchpin of the episode, and it feels a little clunky. She's not supposed to get involved in the fight because Shion feels like he needs to take care of this himself, but I feel like she should have been more involved in the fight outside of the very end. Even if the argument is that her fighting alongside Shion would just get in his way, I feel like the Tensen being as weak as they were by the end could have left Nurugai more of a fighting chance. Also, I don't know why they can't kill Zhu Jin at the end of the episode. Nurugai drops an arbitrary line that it'll take over a day for Zhu Jin to recover. It doesn't make sense to me why she would be able to know that, but I also don't know why the two can't just wait a few minutes to recover and then finish the job. Surely if they both stab the core for long enough, or if one of them takes care of the vines while the other continues stabbing the core, then they should be able to take care of it, right? Either Zhu Jin is supposed to come back later, which makes this feel forced, or they're never coming back after this, which means I don't understand why I can't have the satisfaction of just watching them die. I'm still able to feel very emotional for this episode, but there are a few technicalities holding it back from being as strong as the other encounters that preceded it.

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