Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube

Episode 21

Last week, we focused on cute if slightly unhinged ice maiden Yukime; this time it's the turn of the other woman in Nube's life to take the spotlight – fellow teacher Miss Ritsuko. Ritsuko doesn't do herself many favors in the episode's first half, doing her usual OTT freak-outs at Nube when anything remotely supernatural is mentioned, plus she completely fails to listen to her student, who wisely bypasses Ritsuko altogether, confiding his yokai-related concerns not in his own homeroom teacher, but in Nube.

Shokera, this week's featured yokai, is pretty creepy when viewed from a distance, his features blurred. He dances on rooftops while his victims beneath die of plague and fear. Unfortunately, when his true form is revealed later on, he appears quite ridiculous. Isn't that often the nature of horror, though? The unknown and mysterious is often far more frightening than any number of daft-looking monsters.

Kazama, Ritsuko's student, seems to be a new character – I certainly don't recall him from previous episodes. His main function here seems to be to get Ritsuko to finally stop pretending that weird shit isn't happening daily in Domori, and to appreciate that Nube is far more than the sketchy freeloader she seems to think he is. (He is, of course, a sketchy freeloader much of the time, stealing Kazama's get-well fruit, among other things, but he's also a powerful exorcist!)

Throughout most of the episode, I was sighing about how much Ritsuko sucks in comparison to the far more fun Yukime, but she finally shows some backbone in the second half as she's shown incontrovertible proof of the existence of the supernatural entity that hospitalized Kazama. After initially freezing in fear, she finds brave resolution in her identity as a teacher and even selflessly faces down the monstrous Shokera one-on-one to protect her student. Nube belatedly showing up to save the day demonstrates to her once and for all why his students respect him so much.

A potentially frustrating “could it all have been a dream?” fake-out is thankfully short-lived, and hopefully, from this point onwards, Ritsuko will be less of a wet blanket. Though her response to Nube's cursed pearl necklace gift isn't too reassuring. It's another entertainingly decent, unexceptional episode, marred, at least in my experience, by a terrible quality low-bitrate YouTube stream. I'm sure it's not my blisteringly fast fibre-optic internet connection that's the issue, either. I remain baffled by distributor REMOW's choice of streaming service for their properties. Shows on Crunchyroll or Netflix never look this pixellated and low-resolution unless you're trying to stream on an antique pocket calculator.

Rating: >

Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube is currently streaming on YouTube.