Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube

Episode 8

I wonder what form this episode's monster of the week took in its original 1990s manga/anime form, as I'm pretty sure that “creepy iPad haunted by the souls of amoral scientists” probably wasn't it. This time, Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube focuses on a background student character we've not met yet: cliched bespectacled elementary schoolboy inventor Akira, along with introducing another two female students, Noro and Shizuka, plus boastful rich kid Shuichi. I don't know what it is about know-it-all “smart kid” characters, but they rub me the wrong way, and Akira bugs me. I suppose that most of the kids in this show are fairly stereotypical of one character archetype or another, but up until now, I haven't felt that it actively detracts from my enjoyment of the show.

Akira seems to spend most of his time inventing ridiculously advanced contraptions, using scrap pieces of tech he picks up from bargain bins. Most of his inventions, which seem wildly impractical, tend to go wrong chiefly because, as a child scientist character, of course, he doesn't retain an ounce of common sense. At least his heart is in the right place – his usual motivations for making metal abominations are due to his commendable drive to help people and make them happy.

When he starts passing off even more disturbing contraptions than usual as his own, we know something's off, and it's that the creepily possessed tablet he recently acquired has been whispering instructions in his ears like a neodymium necronomicon, revealing to him cursed blueprints. Even Nube realizes his student ain't right when Akira builds a threatening-looking mecha-thing that digitally resurrects the dead and feeds on their souls. I mean, that's one hell of a science project, but realistically, that's more high school level, I'd say.

Akira's Reanimator-bot seizes the spirit of beloved recently-deceased school bunny rabbit Shiro, disturbingly depicting an image of its crumbling soul on its shiny OLED screen, before grabbing a terrified Noro, harvesting her precious fluids life essence. Yes, not only is this the one where the bunny dies, it also doubles as the “too much screen-time is bad for kiddies, mmmkay?” episode. I take from this that excessive exposure to YouTube/TikTok/Instagram will make your child construct metal-tentacled digital demon bots that suck the souls out of female students' bodies.

Of course, Nube does his demon hand thing and rips the monster-bot a new exhaust port, before confronting the unrepentant deceased scientist dudes within the Evil iPad. It seems they've formed an afterlife collective where, unbounded by limits of time and space, they continue to pursue scientific advancement. Seems they still haven't cracked the formula for Artificial General Intelligence yet, though OpenAI may wish to take some pointers from this episode and start murdering a few of their engineers to harness the unlimited compute power of their souls, enslaving them in the seemingly inevitable production of a terrifying new Machine God to subjugate humanity for all eternity. (Sorry, I've been watching far too many panicky tech YouTube videos recently.)

While the underlying concept behind this episode is kind of intriguing, in execution, this is perhaps the simplest, most uninteresting episode so far. Even the brief stinger at the end is very predictable, and despite apparently learning his lesson, Akira remains insufferable to the end. Also, I'm still sad about the bunny.

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