Blue Exorcist: The Blue Night Saga

Episode 5

It's so often the way. The previous episode ended with a great cliffhanger, you spent the next week anticipating the payoff, and then moments into the new episode, you're already feeling flat. In fairness, the crisis hasn't dissipated, there are strong moments, and the last minutes bring this season's terrible love triangle into vivid relief. This episode doesn't ruin anything, it's just a let-down after the first four episodes.

A lot of the disappointment is in the visual presentation. I give Studio VOLN credit for making action scenes engaging with limited animation, but here, the gap between the calamitous events and the scanty visuals is too wide. It's made worse by too much of the episode sidelining the characters we care about.

It's kind of notable to see Lucifer and his fellow divinities swearing fealty to Satan so readily, but it's a mundane scene. And the moment when Mephisto Pheles refuses to swear fealty is thrown away. Where's the campy showmanship that Mephisto can't resist? I was hoping for a rubber duck, at least.

The episode's strongest in showing parallels. We see Yuri's distraught reaction to Satan's cruelty, and moments later, we see Rin similarly shocked, no longer able to regard his father (or Father) as just a punch-bag Big Bad. Then there's the twinning of Satan with Shiro, cemented by their use of the same phrase (“On second thought…”) in connection with Yuri.

Both Shiro and Satan had “monstrous” origin stories. However, for all of Shiro's self-protecting performance as a cold-hearted villain, he struggled to escape his story, even when Yuri first met him. Meanwhile Satan's just embraced his devilry. His chosen name's part of that – witness his rage Yuri calls him by his “childhood” name of Rinka. Maybe under the Evil God pontificating, there's still a puppyish blue flame wanting to get out and play.

Of course, Shiro and Satan are linked by their feelings for Yuri. Even Satan's less inhuman, less evil, than the “ordinary” officials protecting their torture-chamber by letting the conflict play out, regardless of casualties. It's a common aphorism of fantasy; the worst demons of hell have nothing on a sociopathic bureaucrat.

There seems little room to doubt that Yuri's love for Shiro is real now, as I questioned previously. Still, I'd like to see her challenged a bit more about that down the line. She has a good speech about “reaching out” towards the warmth she feels in Shiro, but is that love or just kindness?

Either way, it's great when Shiro throws away his cigarette – that standby symbol of masculine cool – to grab Yuri's arm, in a doomed bid to keep her from her destiny. That's followed by the look of shock, then peace, in Yuri's eyes. Of course we want them to be together, set against our foreknowledge that it's not going to happen.

Cameos this episode include Saburota Todo; the future Kyoto Saga villain is just a despised runt at this point. We also glimpse the child Shura, with Yuri and Shiro discussing the girl's future. Yuri refuses to take in Shura herself, for fear of what would happen if Satan returns. However, in part eight of the previous season, she seemed happy to take that chance if only Shiro lived with them too. Ah, what could have been…