JoJo’s Part 5 Episode 16

JoJo’s Part 5 Episode 16

The Grateful Dead Part 2

The battle between Bruno Buccellati and Prosciutto is picked up exactly where it left off, with the pair hanging out of the side of the moving train. Last week, Buccellati used his stand, Sticky Fingers, to open up the side of the train and tackle Prosciutto out of it.

You may recall that I predicted Buccellati would have some plan to save himself once the two were outside the train, but if he did, we never got to see it. Instead, Pesci saves Prosciutto by hooking his hand with Beach Boy, and Buccellati hangs onto Prosciutto’s leg, being saved by proxy.

However, this safety didn’t last long, at least for Prosciutto. Buccellati uses Sticky Fingers on the fishing line, thereby transferring the attack to Prosciutto’s hand instead. This in turn makes Prosciutto’s hand unzip which releases the hook embedded into it, forcing Prosciutto to fall from the train.

But if Prosciutto falls, doesn’t Buccellati fall as well? He was hanging onto him after all.

This would have been the case except for the fact that Buccellati allows himself to be hooked at the last second to prevent himself from sharing Prosciutto’s fate. But, despite falling from a train moving at 150kph (~93mph), Prosciutto isn’t dead quite yet.

After his little tumble, Prosciutto is missing an arm and just barely hanging onto the underside of the train. As far as his fight with Buccellati is concerned, he’s lost, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have a role to play. By keeping Prosciutto alive and on the train, Araki (the creator of JoJo’s) has solved the issue with Pesci’s Beach Boy.

Good Night, Sweet Aniki

In last week’s episode review I broke down why Pesci’s stand ability isn’t all that great, so if you missed that, I highly recommend going back and reading it. But, for those who can’t be bothered to read the specifics, the tl;dr is that Beach Boy is a stand that requires another stand to be used alongside it.

We previously saw how Beach Boy works well to support The Grateful Dead by trapping opponents so they’re unable to escape The Grateful Dead’s ability, but this episode their roles are flipped. This time around, The Grateful Dead’s ability is supporting Beach Boy by limiting the number of Pesci’s opponents to only one.

If Prosciutto had died immediately after being thrown from the train, then the rest of Buccellati’s team would have regained their strength and Pesci would have stood no chance fighting them all at once. However, in a one-on-one fight against Buccellati, Beach Boy can take full advantage of its single-target nature.

And, to be honest, I’m not entirely sold on how Araki chose to go about doing this. Yes, keeping Prosciutto alive for the duration of the fight against Pesci makes the battle more suspenseful, but at the same time it’s kind of a cheap trick. It’s about as close as possible to false suspense as you can get without crossing the line.

Beach Boy

With Prosciutto taken out of the fight, Pesci finally stands up for himself and becomes the hitman his partner always knew he could be. Interestingly, despite being a member of the hitman squad, Pesci has actually never killed anyone up until this episode. You’d think that would be a prerequisite.

After successfully defeating Prosciutto, Buccellati makes his way back inside the train through a hole he creates in the roof by using his stand. Once inside, the battle of will between him and Pesci truly begins.

During his fight with Mista, Pesci used his Beach Boy to target Mista’s brain once he had him hooked, but this time around he targets Buccellati’s heart. But, while this may seem like a more direct way to kill Buccellati, it was probably the decision which led to Pesci’s eventual defeat.

Theoretically, Pesci could have just targeted the brain as he had in the past, but by switching to the heart as his target, he gave Buccellati an idea. If Pesci is going after his heart, then he must have a way to track it, i.e. the heartbeat and pulse. So, all Buccellati needs to do is stop his heart from beating long enough for Pesci to believe he’s either dead or gone.

This would probably be a difficult task for most other people, even stand users, but by using Sticky Fingers, Buccellati is able to separate his body into multiple pieces, spread them across a room, and even split his heart in two to stop it from beating. And, even after all that, he still required some luck to put himself back together.

Bruno Buccellati vs. Pesci from the anime series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind
Buccellati vs. Pesci

At this point, Pesci assumes that Buccellati has escaped from the train and is moving in to finish off Prosciutto. And, this is the final nail in Pesci’s coffin. Pesci stops the train, rushes out to Prosciutto, and gets his route cut off by Buccellati who appears through the wall of the train.

Beach Boy may be a decent stand for one-on-one fights at range and when there’s plenty of cover, but in a close quarters fight out in the open, it’s easily defeated. Buccellati is able to overpower Pesci by using his own stand against him, breaking his neck with the line from Beach Boy.

The Turtle and Trish

Now, I know this may be hard to remember since it was a whole two weeks ago, but in my review of episode 14 I discussed how the turtle’s stand was actually a terrible place to hide for a number of reasons. Well, guess what. In this week’s episode we see exactly what I was talking about.

In a final act of desperation (after his neck has already been snapped), Pesci pulls Trish out of the turtle’s safe room stand and threatens to smash the turtle along with the remaining members of Buccellati’s team who are within it. This right here is why hiding inside of a turtle is a bad idea.

Luckily Buccellati beats him to death before he has the chance to smash the turtle, but my point still stands. Turtles are defenseless when it comes to humans, so hiding inside of one can’t possibly be a good idea, especially one that’s so obviously a stand user.

Finally, once both Prosciutto and Pesci are dead, Trish’s stand is revealed. It was previously stated that Trish had a stand, but I didn’t quite believe that was the case at the time, and it seems like I may have been right. While she definitely had the potential for a stand, it doesn’t seem to have awakened until just now.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to see what her stand looks like or what its abilities are just yet, but we do see that it’s left a giant hand/claw print in the ground. Is Trish’s stand going to be some sort of giant monster?

Conclusion

As a final comment on this episode of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind, I’d like to point out that I was wrong about Pesci and Beach Boy getting their own mini arc. I really believed that Pesci would come out of this arc alive and show up later on in the series, but that simply wasn’t to be.

And, on a related note, it’s interesting to me that this episode was still titled after Prosciutto’s The Grateful Dead even though Pesci’s Beach Boy was the star of the show.

But, what did you think of this week’s episode? Do you think Pesci deserved his own arc? What are your thoughts on Prosciutto being kept alive solely to make Pesci’s fight more suspenseful? And, what are your predictions about Trish’s stand? Let me know in the comments.

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My review of the next episode is available here.

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