Karen's Anime Blog

Last time, Jiji got possessed by the Evil Eye yokai, which gave him a forehead gem and some really cool dangly earrings. Okarun, still possessing the powers of the yokai known as Turbo Granny, squared off against Evil Eye to protect Momo, a psychic medium whose powers can be best described as “a grabby blue hand that does things.”

First thing’s first, Okarun picks up Momo and gets her the hell out of there, while making it clear that Evil Eye’s time will come. In Okarun’s yokai form, he’s fast enough that he can dodge the energy soccer balls that the other yokai is pelting them with, though Momo chips in with her powers a few times. They get to the top of the house pile, only there’s a new problem: the Worm is now pumping the cavern full of poison. Okarun notes that the Worm’s weakness is sunlight, but it’s not clear yet how that’s going to help. Momo laments that they can’t get back up to the surface, and in theory her grabby blue hand thingy should be able to get up there and pull them up, but I guess her range is still limited right now.

I mostly dig the design of Evil Eye Jiji, but…what’s with the earrings?

Okarun has a plan to get Momo alone back up to the surface, but she’s not having it: she wants to save everyone, not just escape by herself. Okarun talks her into it by pointing out that she may be able to save them with a rope or something if she gets back, also promising that he will somehow save Jiji. Momo takes his hand and the two of them have a moment; normally I don’t do the whole “shipping” business but I have to admit, I like these two as a couple.

Okarun’s plan, amusingly, is to use his yokai strength to launch a chair with Momo in it as far as he can and for Momo to use her powers to spring off from the chair and propel herself back up to the hole. It almost fails; Momo can’t launch herself quite far enough upwards, but her Grabby Hands of Salvation save the day, as they often do. Meanwhile, Jiji has caught up with Okarun.

It didn’t take long for Momo to regret agreeing to Okarun’s plan. I love this expression.

Back in the house, Momo looks around for something to use as a rope and finds a curtain. She rips it up and makes a rope out of it, which seems to go a lot faster than it would in reality, but the rope ends up being about 1/6 the length it needs to be– yeah, I knew that was never going to work. She has an epiphany, thinking back to an old memory of her and Jiji together, then decides the correct course of action is to light the house on fire. As you do. Momo screams for a firetruck, and we finally get the OP! Wow, that was a six minute cold open.

Yokai fight! It’s Evil Eye vs. Okarun for real this time, and the animation is not messing around. At first Jiji appears to have the upper hand and even imprisons Okarun in a kind of house-shaped forcefield; I think this shape comes from the house where the human boy who became Evil Eye was trapped during his short lifetime. Jiji begins punching the hell out of Okarun, and things look bleak, but Okarun makes one thing clear: Evil Eye has hurt Momo, which is just NOT. ACCEPTABLE. Cue Okarun going full throttle and thrashing the other yokai like nobody’s business. I think the two of them are pretty evenly matched: Jiji is stronger most of the time, but Okarun has that 100% mode that he can’t maintain for long, but it’s potent. As exciting as the fight is, it ends with both boys down for the count, and it’s still not clear how they’re getting out of there.

Okarun starts dragging Jiji’s unconscious body up the stairs, but considering the fact that Jiji is practically twice his size, it doesn’t go well. Then Okarun hears a lot of really passionate cursing and realizes they all forgot someone– Turbo Granny is still there! We can’t have that. Unfortunately, she’s still stuck in the bottom house (where Jiji found Evil Eye’s corpse), and literally stuck in that weird orange goo that the Worm was leaking everywhere. Okarun makes a valiant attempt to save her, but manages to get himself trapped in goo as well. Because he already went turbo twice (once against the Worm and once against Evil Eye), he can’t transform for a while. If it weren’t for the poison, maybe they could just wait until he can transform again, but that’s not an option.

Topside, the fire department and the police have arrived. A policeman asks Momo if she started the fire, which she admits to, then she seems shocked when the officer wants to take her down to the station. It seems dumb for her to have admitted it, but what else could she reasonably say? “Some unknown person snuck into this totally isolated house and started the fire, then snuck away?” She tries to tell the cops about the Kito family murders, but naturally, the police are more focused on the whole arson situation. Naturally, after all this time, the sun is setting, and that’s bad for Momo’s plan. She yells for the firefighters to pour more water on the ground as the police drag her away, but then everyone is distracted by an earthquake; I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a coincidence or not.

I can’t think of a caption that would be insane enough to sum up what Momo’s going through at the moment.

The Worm comes up out of the ground and everyone except Momo goes running. We learn Momo’s plan, learned from Jiji when the two were small children: If the soil gets wet, a worm can no longer breathe through its skin, so it will come out of the soil, even though the sunlight will kill it. Hence, “earthworm suicide.” The whole reason Momo started the fire was so the firemen would douse the house with water, and that water got down to the cave. It’s nice that the solution to the problem came from Jiji, even though his consciousness isn’t there at the moment. This is another plot point in this arc that I’m not sure makes sense, but it’s tempting to forgive it because everything is just so weird and cool. But that cavern is immense: the amount of water we see going in there is trivial compared to the amount that would be needed to saturate the soil. Plus, if a lot of water collected in there, Okarun would have drowned on the bottom.

Even Chibi Momo is wearing a super short skirt and thigh highs. Girl always had a certain style.

The Worm is hiding in the shadow of the house, so Momo picks up one of the firetrucks with her telekinesis and uses it to destroy the house. I think that’s the greatest feat of strength we’ve ever seen with her powers. The worm goes into its death throes, and Momo goes up to kick it in and trash talk it, which makes her seem more like the teenager she really is. The Worm moves and Momo dashes away, only for the Worm to vomit up the Kito family– hey, remember them? Strangely enough, this is the second time this week I’ve seen a monster vomit up a person.

Momo greets the Kitos, and she’s pretty friendly considering how they treated her before. Mom Kito is pissed that Momo killed “The Great Serpent Lord,” and at first it seems like she’s just not in the know about what’s going on, but then there’s another earthquake and the volcano on the horizon erupts. Does this mean the Worm, AKA The Great Serpent Lord, actually was keeping the volcano from erupting, like in the myth? How does that make sense?

This is why you always hit the hot springs first, you never know when the volcano will erupt and ruin your vacation destination.

In the next episode preview, we see that Evil Eye has made it up to the surface and he’s attacking Mom Kito, which makes sense since she was the one who had him burned at the stake all those years ago. But do the two of them really have the time to be fighting each other with all the lava racing toward them? There’s more of Evil Eye attacking Momo (where’s Okarun?) and it looks like Seiko is back! Good, the kids need her.

Again, a really fun episode without too much for me to comment on, other than how this show sometimes makes no sense. But it makes zero sense in a really fun way.