Hell's Paradise Season 2

Episode 5

OK, raise your hand if you genuinely thought that our band of misfits weren't running into a trap! One of my favorite tropes in media is when an author just makes it very clear that things are gonna go all sorts of wrong by having the characters constantly point out how they're going to get out of a situation without any issue or they're going to execute a plan perfectly. It's so on the nose I cannot help but laugh, and while I know that the charm is figuring out HOW things are going to go wrong, it's still really funny that the majority of this episode is literally our characters doing that. Thankfully, they were able to mix in some good exposition there with regards to the element weaknesses of Tao and how it can be used to conceal their presence.

I like all the characters are just fully accepting the fact that the abilities that they all heavily rely on are just rooted in Tao. There's a part of me that feels like the show is skipping or condensing a lot of the explanations that probably took place in the original manga. I can infer that they're getting a lot of this information from Mei and the show is a little bit nebulous about how much time has actually passed, although it really could not have been more than half a day, maybe a full day at most. It's very interesting that they're getting a lot of these explanations about Tao from characters who literally just learned about it recently, and it's not even being presented in a way where they are slowly figuring it out and exposing it to the audience as they discover more. But rather almost everyone has a firm understanding about it as they teach it to each other.

However, the characters also make it explicitly clear that they are also incredibly outclassed. Even if they've accidentally harnessed skills utilizing the specific life force, they are not experts on it like the Tensen are. I like the other detail that all of them have been training in hyper specific ways in order to harness the power of Tao in order to extract the elixir of life. One is doing it through sex, one is doing it through meditation and one is doing it through horrific Frankenstein experiments. I like that the Tensen have this almost sibling camaraderie with each other, but they all have their distinct ways of going about things. I'm sure that, given the way that this episode ends, the subsequent episodes are probably going to showcase more of their individual personalities and abilities which I'm looking forward to.

Chobei is once again affirmed as the wildcard of the show, because I was not expecting him to just explicitly rat out most of the cast. It makes sense when it becomes clear he's just doing this to guarantee his brother's safety, but he also has to understand that he can't trust the Tensen right? Even if he has been growing at an accelerated rate, and even if he can maybe take on one of them, there's no way he can take on all of them right? They are training him and showing them their secrets, but there's no way they're revealing everything to him and they still mostly see him as a means to an end. For someone who is all about surviving with his brother, I guess I'm a little shocked he went for the “sell everybody out” route so quickly. I really hope that backfires in his face because he does deserve to get humble a little bit more which is a funny thing to say about a character that has arguably gotten the hell knocked out of him since the season started.

Rating: