Blue Exorcist: Shimane Illuminati Saga

Episode 7

”Hesitation” is a perfect title for this week's episode of Blue Exorcist, though not for the reasons that I think the show picked it. I'm not sure if the “hesitation” in question is supposed to refer to Renzo's, Izumo's, Rin's, or what. Rather, it's Blue Exorcist itself that is doing all of the hesitating this week, and it's to the story's detriment, I'm afraid.

To be more specific, it's about half of the episode that is dragged down by the awkward pacing. Everything involving Izumo's desperate attempt to escape from the Illuminati on her own is pretty good stuff. There's a lot of inherent drama, and the suspense is carried not through spectacle but through the tension of Izumo's situation, which means that we don't have to worry about the relatively limited production values stifling the story's impact. Renzo's heel turn is played up for all of the pain and betrayal that it represents, too, climaxing in the brutal destruction of Mike and Ume, Izumo's grumpy but ultimately loyal familiars. After seeing everything that Izumo has gone through in her life, the loss of the fox spirits hits surprisingly hard, to the point where I feel like any redemption for Renzo is off the table at this point, unless the show decides to walk things back with a fakeout or something.

The biggest issue with the Izumo plot, which is the timing, really drags down the parallel story with the rest of our heroes. It's a classic case of one scene that only needs a couple of minutes at most to resolve to be cross-cut with a sequence of events that takes much longer to deal with, both in terms of runtime and within the universe of the story. Izumo's escape feels visceral and immediate from minute one but it doesn't work to constantly cut back to the escapades of Rin and the gang. They take hours to walk to the hidden base and get a bunch of exposition about the sinister nature of the town, only to then be forced to deal with a subsequent Dawn of the Dead riff when it turns out that the underground shopping mall that the Illuminati is using as a cover turns out to be filled with zombies.

It's unfortunate because there's a very simple fix for this problem: Simply wait until after the gang arrives at the complex to get the ball rolling on Izumo's story, so that we can have the ticking clock running in real-time. Every second spent dealing with the zombies is another opportunity for the Illuminati to ruin Izumo's life. That's still technically the case with the story presented as is, but we don't feel it nearly as much as we could.

That said, it isn't like this whole episode sucks, or anything. It just comes across as a much shaggier affair than it has any right to, considering how much work Blue Exorcist has put into building up this rescue mission. Now that everyone is (more or less) in the same place, with the same goals—get the hell out of Inari—we can hope that this arc will pick back up with the urgency and execution of its story beats next week.

Rating:

Blue Exorcist: Shimane Illuminati Saga is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.