Karen's Anime Blog

Where we left off: In the Old House Graveyard Pit our trio of heroes are stuck dealing with the sheer evil of the Mongolian Death Worm, a gargantuan man-eating…er…worm. Momo and Okarun started freaking out, with Jiji remaining sane (for the time being). As the episode starts, we find out what Momo and Okarun have been doing: trying to resist the urge to kill themselves; I don’t watch a lot of horror, so seeing Okarun try to rip his own face apart was a hard watch. Jiji flashes back and we learn what happened to his parents: they tried to hang themselves, only he cut them down before they could finish the job. His mother said “Please let me die,” which is what his two friends are now saying. So, just a normal Thursday in Da Da Dan land.

Turbo Granny yells at Jiji to take some twine that just happens to be lying around and tie up Okarun and Momo. That spool of twine…just happened to be there? Wow, that’s convenient. I would make fun of that, but if it weren’t for that, our two leads would totally be dead right here, so I guess I’ll live with it. There’s a really neat little sequence where Momo tries to kill herself by picking up glass shards from the window with her telekinesis and impaling herself, which just goes to show what a dangerous power telekinesis is. Jiji takes takes the shards for her like the gentleman he is, then picks up Momo, Okarun and Turbo Granny and runs out of the house. I guess they’ve been drawing Jiji so buff so he would be prepared for this feat of strength.

Jiji comes face-to-face with the worm, then another figure enters the picture and Momo and Okarun come back to themselves. The new entity is Evil Eye, who also makes people kill themselves. Apparently the worm and Evil Eye do the same thing, so their psychic waves are canceling each other out. That’s…convenient? There’s a lot of awesome animation in this episode, but I’m not sure I buy all the logic here.

The Evil Eye does some kind of mind-meld with Jiji, and we learn that the Evil Eye was originally one of the children that the Kito family sacrificed to “The Great Serpent(Actually just a lame Mongolian Death Worm).” While he was being burned at the stake, the boy wished to kill everyone. When he awoke as a ghost, only children could see him; the parents wouldn’t, but they would commit suicide. The ghost actually didn’t want to commit the murders, but seemed powerless to stop them from happening. In one instance, Mom Kito (who is apparently immortal) said that they had to sacrifice a kid who had lost his parents and bury the house, so I guess that’s how all those houses got down into the pit. Again, not sure if that’s how it would work mechanically.

Evil Eye temporarily forgets he’s evil and dances for the amusement of a small child. Moment of surprise cuteness.

Jiji decides to excavate Evil Eye’s original body to set him free, so he goes spiraling down the “stairs” of the old houses and finds a room with a skeleton with snow-white hair. Turbo Granny warns that Evil Eye cannot be trusted, but Jiji has been entranced by Evil Eye’s sad tale and won’t listen to her. Then the Mongolian Death Worm starts vomiting some weird goo on top of the house where Momo and Jiji are standing, because apparently things just weren’t weird enough yet. I see orange goo and I immediately think of The End of Evangelion, which only makes it better, really.

Jiji offers to play with the childlike apparition of Evil Eye, who always wanted to play with the other children but was not able to. Once Jiji says it, Evil Eye has his way in and possesses Jiji. Just then, the Mongolian Death Worm slips in to eat Momo, and “Jiji,” now super-powered, does awesome damage to the worm. Unfortunately, he attacks Momo right after, so he’s not on the good guys’ side anymore either. “Jiji” says he now wants to kill all the humans, which makes me wonder: how much of the scenario that the Evil Eye showed Jiji was true? Was it all true, but the spirit degraded over time and forgot that it originally didn’t want to kill?

Momo is spared when the Evil Eye takes on the Mongolian Death Worm, using some soccer-like moves; I guess there is still some of Jiji’s personality in there, since Jiji is a soccer fan. That’s a cool way to make use of that particular character trivia. Turbo Granny points out that Jiji has great spiritual power, and she would like to have possessed him herself- high praise! Apparently our hint about this was the fact that during Season One, Seiko kept calling Jiji “a genius.” I remembered her saying that, but at the time it felt like she was just being sarcastic and calling him a moron. I can’t decide if that’s smart foreshadowing or just an annoying “gotcha.”

Outmatched, the Mongolian Death Worm decides to burrow out of the cavern and live another day. The Evil Eye returns to his original goal of killing Momo, but is stopped by Okarun, who has been absent for half the episode– he was recovering after using his yokai powers against the Worm. Okarun isn’t about to let the Evil Eye murder his beloved Miss Ayase! Who will win in this battle of yokai-possessed dorks? Jiji doesn’t seem to have the limitations that Okarun has, but we probably don’t know what Okarun is truly capable of yet; something tells me protecting Momo might push him to level up.

Well, that was certainly an episode. I feel like I’m doing a lot of “this happened, then this happened” with this show; ideally, I’d like to be doing less direct recapping and more commenting on what’s going on, but I’m finding it a challenge to do it with this show. That’s probably because I’m not that knowledgeable about the folklore of Japanese yokai, so I’m not the best person to be covering this. But this is a one-woman show, so I do what I can. But I gotta say, what an MVP that spool of twine turned out to be.