English Dub Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders “Dark Blue Moon”

We’re back after the DBZ: Kai Labor Day Marathon from last week.

Possible Spoilers Below

After Team Joestar welcomes Polnareff to their group from the last episode, they proceed to their journey for Singapore by ship. Along the way, a young androgynous stowaway girl is found as Jotaro attempts to her rescue but comes under attack at first by a Shark but then encounters a Grotesque Aquatic-Based Stand, but is the child the source of this newly encountered threat?

There’s an element of a “who done it?” mystery formula during the proceedings of the episode but parts of it are quickly solved when Jotaro cleverly uses a trick question to instantly spot the real culprit less than 11 mins in. You even get an awesome display of Jotaro’s manliness like when his Star Platinum Stand punches the shit out of a shark to save the young girl.

In theory, it probably would’ve been a much shorter episode if the rest of Team Joestar helped but they were, for the most part, at a disadvantage due to a “razor-sharp scaled” barrier the culprit’s Stand created to keep them from helping while Jotaro is trapped. Not to mention the culprit prefers to pick them off one at a time but is eventually defeated in a satisfying way when Jotaro uses an unexpected trump card of his own. The episode ends with a foreboding cliffhanger when the young girl Team Joestar rescued spots a mysteriously large freighter ship towering over everyone.

Our Take

Once again, episode 5 delivers the right amount of dramatic tension and suspense while following the typical flow of a “Badguy of the week” story structure. I also found the scene with Jotaro underwater to be quite jarring when it reveals that Stand-Users apparently have the ability to talk through their Stands while underwater. I also kinda predicted that the kid was a young girl as it’s often an unspoken rule to purposely play with the audience’s expectations when it comes to gender roles. The scenes when she’s rescued by Jotaro are well handled and consistently follows its own set of rules by reminding the audience that Stands are only invisible to normal civilians.