JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind – 36

「ディアボロ浮上」 (Diavolo Fujou)
“Diavolo Surfaces”

With this week’s episode of JoJo, we start wrapping up the fight with Silver Chariot Requiem by giving the characters motivation to get rid of the Stand. But while our protagonists piece together the mysterious circumstances behind the Arrow, Diavolo is hiding inside of one of the gangstars’ bodies, waiting for the chance to attack.

The most significant development to occur in the episode is learning more about what it means to be hit with the Arrow if you’re already a Stand user. Because Polnareff had taken on the Stand Arrow with Silver Chariot in tow, it provides further complications for his Stand’s abilities as swapping bodies was merely the beginning. On top of the body swapping, his Stand has the added ability to advance the evolutionary cycle further and further as people start to mutate, growing new limbs, parts, and appendages. While it may seem like a small tidbit of the awol nature of Silver Chariot Requiem, it lends itself to the conversation of what gaining a Requiem equivalent of a Stand would entail and how devastating a Stand’s power would be if it amplified an already broken Stand to gain universe-shattering abilities. At this point, it would be difficult to ponder the full potential of a Stand like Gold Experience or King Crimson if powers like regenerative healing or fast forwarding through time was ramped up even further by the Arrow.

It might not have been as eventful in its plot development, but it was electrifying to see how intense the action got as out gangstars fight to make sure that Diavolo doesn’t get the Arrow by any means necessary. Taking on Silver Chariot Requiem was difficult enough as it is, but Diavolo lurking within one of them provided even more tension with Giorno cutting himself to draw King Crimson out of one of their bodies. The tense atmosphere is brought to its highest heights when they are all fighting to guarantee that the Arrow is out of King Crimson’s hands. By the time Giorno activates termites to gnaw off the Arrowhead, the heat is on and we get some of the more intricate action sequences of the episode with the methodical detail behind how one party outwits the other. By the time you expect that King Crimson would lose the Arrow, he already has a countermeasure to take it back. Right when you assume the gangstars are blindly jumping into dangerous territory without thinking anything through, Trish already has Spice Girl softening Sex Pistols’ bullets to use to her advantage in outsmarting Diavolo. They put in all the stops to endure that the second half of the episode is truly a nail biter, and with the cliffhanger they left us on, it shows that they are going to put all the stops in having the fight against a Stand user as intimidating and broken as Diavolo to be as clever and meticulously constructed as it was in this episode.