Blue Exorcist: The Blue Night Saga

Episode 6

One of anime's fascinations is when it tackles a situation familiar in Western SF/fantasy from a very different angle. For example, a story of a human turned into a cyborg, where instead of a dehumanized monster you get a hero like Major Kusanagi. Or a story of an alien in the frozen wastes that can impersonate animals and humans, but instead of being a terrible Thing, it's a benign creature borrowing the best of humanity (To Your Eternity).

This week, Blue Exorcist serves up nothing less than the birth of Satan's spawn. In some ways, it's a familiar treatment, with the luckless mother surrounded by chanting crowds. Only in this version, they're not singing Jerry Goldsmith's “Ave Satani” (from The Omen), even if the Attack on Titan-ish music by Hiroyuki Sawano and Kohta Yamamoto is a fitting substitute. Instead, the crowd is made up of clergy and exorcists, and some of them are chanting none other than the Lord's Prayer. That's a change from the diabolic norm, but not the biggest.

The newborn devil baby sets about killing people with its blue fire, though in fairness, they are trying to kill him. The infant's feral appearance recalls less The Omen, in which the baby looked normal enough, than a horror film just before, 1974's It's Alive. But baby Rin also has a Japanese analog.

Blue Exorcist's real change in perspective is that the monster is being viewed by the time-traveling hero, thinking, My god, that's me. Rin's presence has felt redundant through some of this season, but this is a hell of a payoff – being forced to watch his terrible origins, so sickened that he wishes to expunge his own existence. Rin has no friends here to bolster him up. Instead, he can only watch his mother scream as she brings him into the world.

It's enough to make the episode. There's a question left hanging – will we see more of how the brothers were conceived, or will that moment stay glossed over? I don't mean an explicit horror like Berserk's Eclipse ceremony; there are plenty of ways it could be shown elliptically or symbolically. For now, though, we see Shiro's reaction to the news of Yuri's pregnancy, and it's a shudder of a moment. He shouts he'll kill the baby, not because it's Satan's child but because it's his rival's child. Then Shiro turns into an ignoble postcard memory, in the style of Osamu Dezaki.

Miyazaki fans will remember the God Warrior in Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind. In the film, it's a straight monster, albeit one so vivid that it was homaged in ZENSHU. forty years later. In Miyazaki's manga, the God Warrior is an infant that slaughters people in self-defense but can be taught to be a good child by its adoptive mother, Nausicaä. Will the similarly kind and heroic Yuri live long enough to teach her baby, as she once taught his father?

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Blue Exorcist: The Blue Night Saga is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.