D.Gray-man – 20

Summary:

Back when Allen was still at the Black Order headquarters, he had been given orders by Komui to go to Romania to search for someone. Allen had initially refused to do it since that someone was his former teacher Cross Marian, but he ended up having no choice but to embark on the mission. He now finds himself and Lavi facing off against Arystar Krory, who has just grabbed a man in the crowd by the throat. The rest of the villagers flee after seeing one of their comrades get attacked, but Allen and Lavi bring forth their respective anti-Akuma weapons and prepare for a fight. Allen uses his arm’s gun form to fire into the ground, but Krory is too fast for him. Lavi grows his hammer to an enormous size and then brings it down on the vampire, but Krory surprisingly is able to stop it by using only his teeth. After Krory tosses the hammer and Lavi, Allen successfully manages to grab the vampire with his arm. Krory responds by calling them strange kids and wonders if they’re monsters. He forces Allen to let go of him by biting down and sucking on Allen’s hand’s, but the taste of the arm is so bitter that Krory runs off choking. He returns to his castle with the body of the villager and is greeted by a beautiful girl he calls Eliade. In tears, Arystar Krory admits that he became a vampire again. He then tries to wake up the dead body, but Eliade points out that the guy’s dead and tries to comfort Krory with a hug. Arystar almost bites her neck, but then backs off and tries to tell her that he loves her. She claims to love him back and wants to live together with him in this castle forever.

Allen and Lavi have meanwhile left the villagers behind and have entered the mansion. As they walk through the halls, they are suddenly bombarded with a smell that Allen finds familiar. The smell knocks out Lavi, and Allen comes face to face with a plant that looks ready to eat him. In fact, they are surrounded by these flowers, and Allen is forced to start blasting them with his gun arm. This catches the attention of Eliade, who was in the process of moving the dead villager, and she yells at Allen for destroying Arystar’s precious flowers. At the sight of Eliade, Lavi is immediately smitten, but Allen is more focused on finding the villager that Krory brought into the castle. Eliade identifies it as the body that she’s carting off, and she tosses it down. The plants get to it and eat it up before Allen and Lavi can reach it, but strangely enough, all the flowers then develop a black pentacle pattern and explode. Allen and Lavi manage to survive the blast and are now in the back of the castle facing what appears to be a graveyard. There are eight gravestones here, matching the number of villagers that Krory took away. Upon closer inspection, Allen notices that there is a black pentacle pattern in the soil covering each grave, which would indicate presence of the virus from the blood of an Akuma. Lavi remembers the flowers got the same star pattern when they ate the body earlier, and it would seem to suggest that the bodies are those of Akuma. As Allen starts to realize that they might have had a big misunderstanding, Eliade watches them from a castle window and then walks off.

Preview

This was a pretty good episode, but there were some interesting edits: we don’t get to see Eliade directly kissing Arystar, Eliade later puts the villager body in a coffin and wheels it off instead of dragging it across the floor as she does in the manga, and the graves have stone markings instead of wooden crosses. I can half-justify all of those (too sexual, too bloody, too religious), but that doesn’t mean they don’t still feel like silly edits. Maybe I’ve just grown too used to what later night anime can show.
I also thought it would have been a lot more dramatic if this episode had ended at the end of chapter 34 of the manga instead of the middle of it. That way, instead of just saying it was a big misunderstanding, Allen would have gone one step further and figured out that since Arystar was attacking only Akuma, then he could be their comrade. Of course, there are some other things in that scene that make it more dramatic, but I won’t spoil too much. I’m only mentioning this because I thought they could have gone that little bit further and because this is something that we as the viewer could realize anyway given the clues so far. In any case, all this should be covered next week along with revealing who Eliade is.