English Dub Review: Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou “Curse-Deceiving Chapter, Part 5”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After a hard fought protest and a few scrapes with Oishi, Keiichi, his friends, and the whole village of Hinamizawa gather their forces to finally force Child Welfare Services to act and save Satako from Teppei. With that, the gang are free to celebrate Watanagashi and everything is looking up.

Then Satako brings Keiichi back to her house, only for them to be met by a crazed Teppei, who has somehow gotten free from police custody. He mortally injures Keiichi with a bat, causing Keiichi to go into a rage and kill him, but then pass out from his injuries. When he awakens, he finds only there to see him. She then tells him that Oishi apparently went mad and killed several people at the festival, including the rest of their friends.

OUR TAKE

Well THAT took a turn, didn’t it?! As mentioned last time, this arc combines elements from two previous Higuarshi arcs, one of which being Minagoroshi-Hen. This arc also tackled Satako’s abusive home life, but unlike one arc that had Keiichi kill Teppei to save her (much like the ending of this episode, in fact), that ended with a village wide protest to get her saved through normal channels. Things also seemed like they would end on a happy note there, only to have the last few episodes have that happiness torn down by the incoming force of Miyo Takano and her army of armed goons, who ended up killing all the kids despite them putting up a good fight overall. It’s a bit different than how this arc ended, with the tone basically going on a light switch from happy to grimdark. In fact, I would say that the tone turning on a dime like that kinda was a notable departure from how this series has handled horror before.

From my rewatch of the previous seasons, usually the more horrific or creepy aspects of the series would start with suddenly halting the more calm and peaceful atmosphere, then steadily creeping towards more tension and slowly dialing up the fear factor as the scene went on until it has completely taken over and filled the characters and audience with dread. There are numerous examples of this, among them being in the first arc of the first season, where seemingly innocuous scenes between Keiichi and his friends start out innocently enough before slowly sliding into nightmares. But a pattern I am seeing form with Higurashi Gou is that the scary parts just sort of spring on us suddenly with very little time to process, as well as a heavy, HEAVY emphasis on the gore.

But for better or worse, we have passed the end of these mash up arcs and are finally going into some new material. From here on, we get to see what this season truly has up its sleeves and what ideas it thought were good enough to finally revive this series. I have to say, as a fan of what’s come before in the previous two seasons, I am interested to see where this goes, but I’m also kind of nervous. The ending to the second season seemed so neat and tidy that you’d think there wouldn’t be much more else to do, but we shall soon see if that’s true.