JoJo’s Part 5 Episode 6

Introduction

It’s time for another JoJo’s Friday, and today we’re introduced to the stand of one of Buccellati’s men, Leone Abbacchio. Along with being introduced to his stand, we’re also shown Abbacchio’s backstory. Hopefully this means we’ll be seeing origin stories for the other Jo-Bros as well.

I assume that Buccellati’s origin involves him wanting to become a gangster after seeing how the local people looked up to the gangsters who protected them. However, the other three members are all still a mystery to me since we know so little about them.

Before we get into today’s episode in earnest, I just want to mention that I know the episode is titled, “Moody Jazz’s Counterattack” for Western audiences, but Abbacchio’s stand is actually called Moody Blues, not Moody Jazz. With that in mind, let’s take a look at Moody Blues’ Counterattack.

Moody Blues’ Counterattack

The episode starts off with Abbacchio’s backstory in which he became a police officer shortly after graduating from high school. He decided that he wanted to be a police officer due to his strong sense of justice, which is something we should be familiar with by now as a Jo-Bro quality.

However, he quickly learned that the people he protected often weren’t grateful, and those whom he sent to jail were quickly back out on the streets committing more crimes. Because of this, Abbacchio began feeling like nothing he did as a police officer mattered.

Then, one night he finally decided that he would no longer serve the community, but rather his own interests. He was about to arrest who I can only assume was a pimp and a prostitute, when he was offered a bribe, which he ended up accepting despite his strong sense of justice.

His reasoning for taking the bribe was that even if the criminal was arrested, he would just post bail and be out of jail the next day. This would mean that the criminal would be free, and the state and lawyers would get money for it. But, by taking the bribe, the criminal is still free, but this way Abbacchio is the one who profits.

This seems like a win-win until Abbacchio is responding to a robbery some time after and finds that the thief is the same pimp who he accepted the bribe from. Abbacchio likely would have allowed him to escape for another bribe, but this time there was a murder victim as well.

But, just as it seems that Abbacchio had reclaimed his sense of justice, the criminal reminds him that if he’s arrested, it will come out that Abbacchio had accepted a bribe from him in the past. At this point I expected Abbacchio to shoot the criminal to prevent his secret from coming out, but that wasn’t the case.

Instead, Abbacchio lowers his gun and is about to let the criminal go. However, Abbacchio now has a partner who found the murder victim shot in another room. His partner comes running towards Abbacchio yelling that the criminal has a gun, and dives in front of him to take the bullet for him.

Abbacchio’s partner manages to wound the criminal, but is fatally shot at the same time. After this, when the criminal is arrested it’s revealed that Abbacchio accepted bribes and so he was fired and charged as well.

Skipping to the end of the episode, we see Buccellati find Abbacchio drunk in an alley, where he gives him a speech about the true treasure being the friends you make along the way. This has nothing to do with Abbacchio’s past or current position, but somehow it convinces him to join Buccellati.

Moody Blues

I mentioned in a previous post that the designs of the three stands we had seen at that point in the part, Gold Experience, Sticky Fingers, and Black Sabbath, all shared something in common with their users. While I made an argument for Polpo and Black Sabbath at that point, I can’t quite do the same for Abbacchio and Moody Blues.

The fact is that Abbacchio and Moody Blues simply don’t have anything in common other than perhaps their general figure shapes. Moody Blues appears to be modeled after a telephone with the screen on its forehead and speakers on its shoulders, but I don’t see what that has to do with Abbacchio.

Instead, Abbacchio and Moody Blues are tied together based on how the stand ability works, although it doesn’t really make all that much sense. First I’ll explain how the ability works, then what it has to do with Abbacchio’s past, and finally what I don’t understand about it.

Moody Blues’ ability isn’t an offensive one, but rather an information gathering one. It’s able to replay events based around a person of Abbacchio’s choice. In the case of this episode, Abbacchio replays what happened to Narancia starting five minutes prior.

By using this ability, Abbacchio is able to speed up, slow down, or even pause the replay so he can get a better look at what happened. As Buccellati said in the previous episode, Abbacchio’s stand really is the perfect one for defeating this particular enemy.

So what does this have to do with Abbacchio’s past? The fact that his stand ability allows him to replay things, but not redo them, implies that Abbacchio thinks about his past mistakes a lot, but wouldn’t necessarily have done anything differently.

In particular, his accepting of the bribe and the subsequent death of his partner weighed heavily on him. When Buccellati finds him drunk in an alley, he had just been revisiting the scene of his partner’s death, probably to relive it in some way.

Hopefully everything I’ve explained about his stand makes sense so far. Now we’re going to get into the part that I don’t understand about it. When Abbacchio is using his stand, Buccellati warns him that he’s unable to defend himself while he’s replaying events with his ability.

I get that Abbacchio’s stand can’t defend him and replay events at the same time, but Abbacchio can always call back his stand at any point to defend himself. Further, it’s not as though he’s incapacitated while using his ability. He’s still fully functional and can see if he’s in any immediate danger.

It seems to me that the fact that Abbacchio “can’t defend himself” while using his stand ability is supposed to be its weakness. However, the true weakness of that ability that I see is that it has no offensive capabilities and can only replay events. That ability doesn’t seem like it would be too useful in most situations.

Solving the Mystery

As is often the case in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, although Abbacchio’s Moody Blues is the perfect stand for this situation, defeating the enemy stand user isn’t straightforward. In fact, Abbacchio doesn’t even last long enough in this battle to see its conclusion.

After using Moody Blues’ ability, Abbacchio and Buccellati discover that Narancia and the others were pierced by the enemies stand, as we saw happen to Giorno, and then deflated like a balloon. The rubbery husks of Buccellati’s team were then pulled down drains or into the boat by other means.

However, when they open the boat via Sticky Fingers, they find that the interior is empty. Further, when Abbacchio discovers that the enemy stand has taken their comrades into the pipes, and they open the pipes with Sticky Fingers, those are empty as well.

Abbacchio eventually figures out the mystery behind the enemy stand, but is unable to do anything about it. But, before he’s able to relay this information to Buccellati, he’s attacked by the enemy stand and pulled inside the boat just like the rest of the team.

However, jut before being dragged in, he makes sure to wound his hand and leave a trail of blood to lead Buccellati to his conclusion. Luckily, Buccellati is one of the more intelligent Jo-Bros, and is able to figure out that Abbacchio left the blood trail on purpose.

He then finds that the blood trail doesn’t actually go down any drains, but instead stops right on the surface of the deck. From this, he then understands what Abbacchio had discovered before him, that the boat is the enemy stand; sort of.

In part 3, Stardust Crusaders, there really was a boat that was a stand, but this time around the boat isn’t really the stand itself, but rather is being manipulated by the stand. In fact, the boat on which the Jo-Bros were traveling is actually two boats, one stretched around the other to form a type of boat-ception, if you will.

You may recall that when they acquired the boat, Buccellati requested the one at the far end. I don’t remember exactly which number boat they thought they received and I’m not going back to find out, but basically either boat #1 or #2 was missing out of the lineup.

For the sake of this explanation, let’s assume that boat #2 was missing, and so the boat the Jo-Bros got was #1, which was right next to #3. So where was #2? Boat #2 was inside boat #1, but how?

We were never given a name for the enemy’s stand, but we know that its ability allows it to deflate anything it punctures. This means that the enemy deflated boat #1, and then stretched it over boat #2 to make it look like nothing was out of the ordinary.

So where were Giorno and the Jo-Bros taken after they were deflated? In the thin space between boat #1’s husk and boat #2. To defeat this stand user, Buccellati then sinks the boat, which would drown the enemy stand user unless he releases his stand ability and escapes from between the boats.

Conclusion

At first I thought I found a stand ability inconsistency in the way in which Sticky Fingers interacted with the enemy stand in this episode. But, upon further inspection, it checks out when we compare it to how Sticky Fingers is used in Buccellati’s fight against Giorno.

The one thing I still do take issue with, however, is that the role of the fly changed over the course of the episode. Originally, the fly was Narancia’s shoe transformed by Giorno’s ability, but it later becomes the embodiment of the enemy stand user.

I guess that’s just one of those small plot holes we have to overlook simply because JoJo’s is so bizarre. Speaking of Bizarre, the enemy stand in this episode was pretty bizarre, but was it the most bizarre we’ve seen in the series yet? Let me know which stand you think is the most bizarre in the comments.

Also, if you enjoyed this post, let me know by clicking the like button down below. You can also follow me on Twitter @DoubleSama if you’d like to be notified every time a new post goes live.

If you want to keep up to date with everything going on with the site and community, while Twitter is certainly a great resource, I’m also going to be posting weekly updates to my Patreon page every Friday (same day as new JoJo reviews). You can think of it like a weekly blog about my blog.

Finally, there’s a Discord server for anyone who wants to join and interact with the community. The server is open to everyone, although patrons have access to tier-specific roles along with their other benefits.

My review of the next episode is available here.