After a week’s break, Hell’s Paradise is back and we’re fighting flowers.
The episode is almost wholly focused on Gabimaru, who decides that rather than trying to research the mysteries of the Island, he needs to march off to the central area himself to snag the Elixir, like he didn’t learn his lesson about anything.
That lesson seems ready to be beaten into him by one of the immortals, however – the same one we saw last time. It’s a little cross that it has to fight again, since it’s still exhausted from last time, but the battle is none the less joined.
Gabimaru, as expected, gives an excellent account of himself. Though he gets thrashed a few different ways, causing his opponent to question if he’s even human based on how much punishment he takes, he does ultimately manage to strike so fast and so hard as to overwhelm the immortal’s regeneration. Which doesn’t actually kill it, but forces it to undergo a flowery rebirth into an inhuman monster.
Though Gabimaru is impelled by ninja instincts to do damage to the monster, it’s too much for him, and he only avoids death because the little girl comes to rescue him.
Meanwhile, the rest of Gabimaru’s team heads out to find the two of them. However, he’s first found by one of the other teams. Hopefully the fact he was just thinking about how he needs allies will prevail over his general standoffishness. The race is very clearly off compared to the effort it will take to take down the immortals.
Speaking of taking them down, Gabimaru’s battle reveals something I had suspected. We get a scene where the seven immortals (said to be fragments of one original) meet up, and the one Gabimaru fought is… not in good shape, being aged and degenerated until it receives a fresh cup of the Elixir of Life. This means that these jokers are about as immortal as the Homunculi in Fullmetal Alchemist – eventually, it seems like they will run out of juice to keep going.
I think of particular interest in an episode that was basically one big fight and a couple of frame scenes (putting the idea of a satisfying season conclusion ever further from the show’s grasp, though permakilling one of the seven might be worth it) was the moment where Gabimaru, at the brink of death, remembered his training and how the master of the village stressed that he had beaten it in to a level of instinct that Gabimaru would follow the rule about damaging your opponent no matter what in such a circumstance, as it shows just how much the old man made Gabimaru what he is, helping build up a rivalry that will hopefully come to fruition somewhere around the final movements of the full story, even though one side is not physically present for most of the narrative.
On the whole, I think Hell’s Paradise is pretty clever and well-written… but its ambition is far too big for twelve episodes, so we’ll see how well the production team makes it fit.