This review covers the dozen Blue Exorcist episodes streamed from October to December 2024. For anyone new to Blue Exorcist, this is not where you start. This far into the series, the season's a case of what TV Tropes calls Continuity Lock-Out, with too much story (especially character) baggage for you to board now. The same applies if you've skipped the last season or two. Newbies can scroll down to the footnote(*) at the bottom to start.

Blue Exorcist: Beyond the Snow Saga starts after our heroes have notched up some victories. They've destroyed the diabolical monster-making Far East Laboratory and saved their kidnapped classmate Izumo, freeing her from a lifetime's nightmares. But they haven't canceled the apocalypse declared by the despairing divinity Lucifer. He is, you'll remember, bent on resurrecting Satan and returning the world to nothing.

Instead of planet-scaled battles, this season features multiple strands involving different characters. One of the most prominent involves the burly Kyoto boy Bon (Ryuji), who has a streak of rooster hair. Shockingly, though, he's shaved it by part two. He's turning a corner, you see. For all his magic talents, Bon feels aimless after realizing his home will never be the place he remembers from childhood. It ties to a moment last season where Bon put down a wretched not-really-monster as it hopelessly cried, “Home.”

Bon is awed and inspired by Lightning, the chill, lice-ridden, high-powered Exorcist. Officially, Lightning is a new teacher at True Cross Academy, though we see him give exactly one lesson this season. He's an investigator, nosing into the origins of the hellish laboratory in the last season, and into the hidden truths of the world.

Bon is smitten with Lightning's attitude to life, which seems Zen-like in its cheery simplicity, though we're clued in that there's something cold beneath. (Naturally, Lightning is one of the most coolly watchable characters this season.) Bon begs his way into becoming Lightning's apprentice, and the two eventually make huge discoveries about the show's background. They're Eva-grade findings, in terms of the god-level beings involved and the outsized glass tanks where terrible things grow.

So that's one strand. Then there's the hyper-cute daily awkwardness of Rin and Shiemi, with the brash boy a-flutter as he tries to make Shiemi comprehend that he likes her, like that. It's made ten times sweeter when Izuno, once as haughtily aloof as her eyebrows, feels forced to help things along. How people change!

Meanwhile, Shiemi wonders if she can truly become an Exorcist. Renzo remains the show's Nowhere Man; no one knows whose side he's on, and that goes for Renzo himself. And then, of course, there's Yukio, another Nowhere Man. He is respected and trusted by pretty much everyone, yet he harbors the terrible secrets of his demonic power and is haunted by Lucifer's taunting offer last season.

Another strand involves Rin and Okamura traveling to Japan's snowy northern region, where Shura has disappeared. This reveals Shura's origin story—you knew she had to have one—involving a family curse and a snake demon obsessed with recreating his human lover through a production line of offspring, no less nasty than the lab experiments elsewhere.

Any discussion of action raises production issues. After Kyoto Saga, the Blue Exorcist anime moved from A-1 Pictures to Studio VOLN, and let's not pretend that hasn't changed things. The battles, the spectacle, the creatures… They're far more limited, more reliant on static graphics and manga aesthetics that sometimes don't gel, even if you're a viewer with instinctive goodwill towards cheap effects. I'm a fan of last-century Doctor Who, and even my patience was stretched by one giant snake battle.

Yet none of these limits broke the season for me. Despite the occasional dead frame or distractingly ugly deformity, the characters still look great, impactful, and lively. (The snake yokai looks ropey in giant form, but he's imposing as a multi-eyed humanoid.) And there's a lovely Little Prince-ish dream scene with Shiemi, making up for a lot.

There are also the original Japanese actors, coming up to fifteen years of playing their roles. No one could sound as "Shiemi" as Kana Hanazawa. Hiroshi Kamiya – who's had his whole run as Attack on Titan's Levi in the meantime – sounds funnier each season as the suavely flamboyant Mephisto Pheles. The music lifts the show nearly as much. The new title song, by the singer Reol, is instantly catchy. The main music is still by Hiroyuki Sawano and Kohta Yamamoto, and I've given up thinking of it as anything other than their Titan music with a few variations, yet it powers the series along.

Much the same applies to other aspects of the season: obvious, but enjoyable. Some pundits will complain that Yukio's downward trajectory has been predictable for years. However, it's still compelling to watch – especially when that trajectory is literalized as he steps numbly off a skyscraper. There are equally clear motifs: multiple characters losing and gaining motivations, and lots about hero worship (and what it might do to the “hero”). The season lets us puzzle over characters' murky attitudes to life – Renzo's, Lightning's – and shows the murkiest character, Yukio, being maddened by the sheer simplicity of his brother Rin.

I was looking out for diminishing returns, and it's hard not to notice that Shura's dark origin hits many of the same beats as Izumo's storyline last season. (And Izumo's story had more real-world heft, centered on parental rejection.) However, the Shura story goes into far more push-the-line territory with its sexual content. It eases us in with light comedy – a landlady gets the wrong idea about why two young men are staying together at her inn. Then, before long, there's the prospect of hypnotically coerced sex and, later, some hyper-uncomfortable flashbacks showing how a brainwashed girl might seek a partner. It culminates in a breathtaking scene where a topless Shura tries seducing the least appropriate man around… who, mercifully, doesn't take any nonsense.

I've hardly mentioned Rin – still the supposed hero - in this review, and there are times you wonder where he's gone. But his charm's still the same: a completely innocent, pure-hearted shonen fighter, starkly contrasting to the show's darker elements and conflicted characters, as if he never got the script. But the season's cliffhanger suggests it's finally Rin's time to turn a corner too, that he's changing irreversibly. Fingers crossed the next season, The Blue Night Saga, won't welch on that...

(*) Any newbies should start with the first Blue Exorcist TV season released back in 2011, though weirdly, you should only watch the first fifteen episodes(**). The rest diverged from the source manga by Kazue Katō into a now-retconned timeline. (That timeline also included Blue Exorcist: The Movie in 2012, which you can skip too.) For the canonical story, jump from episode 15 of the first season to part one of the Kyoto Saga season, then to the Shimane Illuminati Saga and then Beyond The Snow Saga.

(**) Okay, okay, so technically, there are some scenes in parts 16 and 17 of the first Blue Exorcist anime, which can also be said to be “canon” as they follow Katao's manga. However, they're placed next to scenes that flat-out contradict the manga's story. For that reason, it's far simpler to jump from part 15 of the first series straight into Kyoto Saga.