×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind
Episode 7

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 7 of
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind ?
Community score: 3.5

If there's one thing that I ask of my entertainment, it's that it Make My Day-to-day life ever so slightly more interesting. In that sense, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has always been a hit. Hirohiko Araki's artistic voice is one in seven billion, and the series has always sought to bend reason into never-before-seen shapes.

This episode begins with our group trying to decide how to move forward now that rival factions of Passione are trying to kill them for Polpo's treasure. Last week's baddie was Mario Zucchero, who now lies on the deck of the boat with his decapitated head zipped off and his body laying limp as our heroes merciless beat and torture what's left of him—partially out of revenge and partially to ascertain the names of his cohorts. Our leads are a violent and crass lot, and the torture escalates to cringe-inducing schemes involving fish hooks and eyeball-burning magnifying lenses. It gets to the point where you assume the sadism has reached its natural conclusion, and then a f***ing dance sequence happens.

There's so much contagious joy to be had within all this awfulness. It's not for the faint of heart, obviously. If you're prone to squeamishness in the face of body horror, you probably ducked out of JoJo's long ago, but there's something so exceptionally loving about the presentation this time around. It's psychedelic. Transcendent. There's a sensory experience in this torture sequence, and it's wrapped its big disgusting arms all the way around me.

But that's just the beginning of the episode. The rest of the week's adventure is much more standard fare, as we move to familiarize ourselves with Guido Mista. Mista's Stand(s) are the Sex Pistols, a batch of little yellow gremlins that live inside his revolver. They seem obnoxious, but they don't take kindly to being spoken to like pets. From what we've seen so far, I would describe their ability as the power to redirect bullets, which comes in handy when it's time for Giorno and Mista to reach shore and hunt down Zucchero's partner. As expected, we appear to be cycling our way through the gang, giving each member a turn at having their own sub-arc. We haven't learned nearly as much about Mista as we have Abbacchio, but we're still in the midst of his two-parter.

While Mista's stretch of the episode doesn't stir as much emotion in me as the dance-torture scene, one thing that I continue to admire about Golden Wind is its visual splendor. I think there was some mourning early on for the loss of Part Four's distinct color palette, but I don't think JoJo's has ever been this energetic and creative on the production front. This aesthetic shift has added so much personality to a franchise known for having oodles of it, and the show breathes in a way that I don't think has been true for earlier seasons. If this keeps up, I think my pattern of liking each new series significantly more than the last is going to persist.

Man, that dance scene. Even being told ahead of time that there was going to be such a thing didn't prepare me for how it was going to feel once I had the whole audiovisual experience. Golden Wind is a series of compromised morals—nasty people doing nasty things in the vague direction of good intentions. It's slimy, violent, gross, and it absolutely positively slaps.

First Seven Minutes Rating: A+++

Rest of the Episode: B+

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw


discuss this in the forum (199 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

back to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind
Episode Review homepage / archives