JoJo’s Part 5 Episode 36

JoJo’s Part 5 Episode 36

Diavolo Surfaces

Episode 36 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind is the single most confusing episode of JoJo’s yet. Before part 5 was animated people used to say that King Crimson’s abilities make no sense, but I actually find King Crimson to be fairly easy to understand.

What I don’t understand are the chain of events that happened within this episode. Some of the things that happen and make no sense are explained poorly, others are explained in ways which themselves don’t make sense, and then there are those which are simply not explained at all.

So as much as I’d love to be the person who can explain everything that happened in this episode to you, I can’t. Instead I’ll be sharing my confusion with you in the hopes that either I’m not alone or someone else will be able to come to the rescue and explain what I just watched.

Let’s start with some of the simple thing and work our way up to the most illogical. At the very start of the episode we’re shown a shot of Buccellati’s body and it’s revealed that Doppio was in fact the personality which got swapped into it.

It’s still unclear exactly why Doppio and Buccellati’s souls were swapped since they weren’t actually near each other, but that’s what happened. However, to further complicate things, Diavolo’s soul was also swapped out of his own body, which implies a whole host of other issues I’ll get to shortly.

But the more I think about it, the more it would have made sense for Diavolo and Doppio to have their souls swapped with each other. They were the closest ones to one another, after all.

Giorno’s Plan

Giorno, the only character currently within his own body, realizes that Diavolo isn’t just nearby, he’s residing within the same body as one of the JoBros. He comes to this conclusion after Mista’s revolver is broken while the group is out in the open with nobody else around.

He then reveals that because his stand, Gold Experience, deals with life, he can determine how many souls are in an object by touching it. This was previously hinted at when Narancia was killed and Giorno mentioned that his own body was hollow after reviving it.

With this ability, Giorno suggests that he can determine which of them is harboring a second soul in their body, thus determining where the boss is. To this end, he knows that the boss isn’t within his own body because it was empty when he transitioned back into it from Narancia’s.

Mista in Trish's body aiming at Giorno from the anime series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind
Mista in Trish’s body aiming at Giorno

However, Mista isn’t convinced and is worried that by letting Giorno check his (Trish’s) body, he’ll be killed by Diavolo hiding within Giorno. The reason Giorno wanted to check Mista first is because nobody else was closer to his gun when it broke than Mista himself.

Seeing that his team is on the verge of breaking down due to mistrust of one another, Buccellati volunteers to have his (Diavolo’s) body searched first. I originally figured that Diavolo would be in the same body as Buccellati because there wasn’t another soul for his to swap with, but this turns out to be incorrect.

Since Diavolo is a split personality, it appears that he can be swapped into another body as a split personality as well. I guess it was just pure luck that sent Doppio into Buccellati’s body over Diavolo. Diavolo turns out to be in Mista’s body along with Trish, which explains why she could never sense him appearing.

Diavolo’s Precognition

Now, everything so far at least makes sense, even if it breaks the pre-established rules regarding how souls were swapped with one another. From here on out, however, that isn’t the case. But before getting into the things that really don’t make sense, we need to take another look at King Crimson.

King Crimson’s main ability has been explain fairly well so far. It skips time forward while allowing the user to react to the time that was skipped. This alone is a broken ability, but it isn’t the only ability King Crimson has access to.

You may have noticed that there’s a smaller face on the forehead of King Crimson, this is known as Epitaph. The best way I can explain it is that it’s essentially to King Crimson what Bites the Dust was to Killer Queen in part 4. It’s a secondary ability which almost completely covers the weaknesses of the main ability.

King Crimson holding the stand arrow from the anime series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind
King Crimson holding the stand arrow

Epitaph’s ability is precognition. We’ve already seen it at work earlier in the series when Diavolo lent its power to Doppio during the fight against Risotto. However, when used in tandem with King Crimson, it allows Diavolo to use his time-skip ability in response to future threats.

And now that we’ve established how King Crimson and Epitaph work, I’m unable to explain to you how Trish and Spice girl were able to outsmart Diavolo. In fact, Trish isn’t even able to explain this even though she tries.

She says that she turned Mista’s bullets soft, but that doesn’t explain what happened next. How did those bullets end up getting through King Crimson and Epitaph’s abilities? And why did they take so long to finally hit King Crimson? And how did they somehow fling the stand arrow out of his reach? Also when did she touch the bullets?

I have so many questions about what happened during that scene, and I feel like there isn’t a real explanation of what happened.

Requiem’s Shadow

But there’s something that makes even less sense than Spice Girl being able to outsmart King Crimson and Epitaph, Silver Chariot Requiem. For starters, we were introduced to yet another ability it has which is to fundamentally alter the composition and DNA of all life affected by its first two abilities.

I guess this would end up killing everything it infects, but that’s not actually clear. It could just be mutating appearances, and if so is little more than a body horror ability. Still, nobody wants to be turned into a mutated blob of flesh, so I can understand why this is a big deal to the JoBros.

The mystery here is why it has an ability like this at all. Silver Chariot Requiem’s abilities are all over the place and don’t really have much in common with each other. The best explanation we get is simply that it’s all-powerful and has the ability to manipulate mind, body, and soul.

However, we now get to the part of the episode that made the least amount of sense to me: Chariot Requiem’s true nature and how Diavolo defeats it. It’s revealed that Chariot Requiem’s shadow always appears opposite from the person who is viewing the stand.

What this means is that if two people are looking at Chariot Requiem from two different angles, they will see its shadow to be in two different places. This phenomenon was explained well in the episode and I have no real issue with it.

It was also stated that this phenomenon is partially due to Chariot Requiem’s nature as the shadow of a former soul, that being Polnareff’s. And while this clearly isn’t a logical explanation, that’s why its own shadow appears differently to each different soul which views it. It’s always as if they’re seeing the shadow of their own soul.

But no, the part that really doesn’t make sense is that Diavolo is able to defeat Chariot Requiem by smashing a miniature star which he believes is behind his head. Since Chariot Requiem’s shadow is always in front of him, Diavolo believes there must be a light source always behind him to cast this shadow.

I have no idea why he would come to this conclusion after how he explains the nature of the stand. Also, why are we able to see the star behind his head in that instance, but not for anyone else? Further, why would smashing his personal star destroy Chariot Requiem for everyone?

Conclusion

Were you as utterly confused as I was about the events in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind? Do you know how Trish was able to outwit Diavolo? Do you understand how Diavolo came to the conclusion that there was a miniature sun behind his head he needed to smash? Let me know in the comments.

If you enjoyed this very confused review, be sure to click the like button ❤ down below. Also follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on all the latest content. I tweet out every time a new post goes live, so it’s the best way to stay up to date.

Finally I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika tier this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the next episode is available here.

3 Replies to “JoJo’s Part 5 Episode 36”

  1. One flaw of a faithful adaptation is that it includes all the flaws of the original.

    Chariot Requiem is a Stand that works on an esoteric level, even more abstractly than Heaven’s Door. I think the mutation is a consequence of a body having a soul it’s not belonging to. As for the shadow sun thing, yeah I got nothing. To be fair maybe it’s because the Stand itself is a living shado- Wait I got it! I think it’s a thematic thing. If it’s the shadow of the soul, then I think this is a case of “the weakness is with you”. Maybe the figure is nothing more than a tangible projection and the real stand is the light sources of people nearby.

    As for Sex Pistols vs Epitaph, I think Mista (he’s still in Trish’ body?) tried to imitate Bruno and exploited Diavolo’s shortsightedness. Epitaph can only see 10 seconds into the future and planning ahead of that gives you the advantage. During that interlude, I think we can infer that Mista did his ricochet thing or Trish used Spice Girl to soften surfaces and caused the trajectories to rebound and redirect force.

    Although the simplest answer is that Diavolo is prone to tunnel vision. Remember when he didn’t exactly finish off Polnareff before and allowed him to escape into a hobo’s cubbyhole (and recover there)? Trivia: Polnareff got cut off from contacting Jotaro (or anyone) because Passione has a LOT of control.

    1. The whole Trish and Mista thing still has me confused. The bullets were completely liquefied by the time they hit King Crimson, so how do they even have enough force to do anything? I could understand it if Trish turned the bullets rubbery so they bounced around for a while, but she seems to have completely destroyed them to the point that they’re unusable. We see the remains of the bullets slowly leaking out of King Crimson’s wounds.

  2. hey guys, happy to see I’m not the only one messed up by “ougon no kaze” finals.
    also, a question: how did Buccelati unleashed all souls, like, how?

Leave a Comment