English Dub Review: Dark Gathering “Scary School Stories: Nightmare”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Dorothy has a plan that Yayoi needs to know about, especially since it involves the Spectre of Death.

Our Take: 

Yayoi may have met her match in the form of Dorothy.  This was proven in the previous episode, where Yayoi and her classmates wound up in the clutches of Dorothy’s diabolical plan.  Now, they’re caught playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a grudge-filled teacher determined to exact revenge against the children who bullied him.  Meanwhile, Dorothy is back in the real world, enjoying the chaos in the spirit realm.

Without Keitaro and Eiko to back her up, Yayoi would have to rely on her class representative to help her survive the teacher’s lethal take on a harmless children’s game.  They eventually survived the teacher’s wrath thanks to the F Tunnel Ghost and managed to help the teacher’s spirit pass on peacefully, thus ending the curse.  With Yayoi’s school closed for investigation, Yayoi had the opportunity to plan her trip to Kyoto to find Ai. This is another episode that concludes the previous one’s plot in the first half. On one hand, it keeps the seasonal plot moving without dragging the scenario out for too long. On the other hand, it often leaves an anticlimactic feel in its conclusion compared to how it started in the previous episode.

Fortunately, the episode’s second half compensated for it, only because we’re nearing the endgame of the show’s first season.  This is because Yayoi discovers the origin of the Spectre of Death from Dorothy herself.  The Spectre is a project created by her mysterious allies capable of bringing in a “new dawn of history”, which I can assume means the “end of days”.  But the real shocker is that Dorothy was actually possessed by a body-snatching spirit that trapped her real soul into a doll.  Because of this, Yayoi decides to be one of the body-snatchers to stealthily investigate the spirit and its allies, hoping she’ll find the key to defeat the Spectre for good.

The penultimate chapter of Dark Gathering effectively delivered plenty of exciting teases for next week’s finale, which is enough to compensate for its anticlimactic end to the teacher’s game of hide-and-seek.  We also see that Eiko may have found a new friend in the class representative, though not in an endearing way.  Since next week’s finale will focus on Yayoi and the others rescuing Ai from an arranged marriage, we probably won’t explore that element again until its potential second season.  Besides that, this episode gives me hope that the finale will be quite a roller coaster of frights.